Forms people finish

A form is the narrowest point of a website. Everything before it is persuasion and everything after it is fulfilment, and most of the loss happens in between, for reasons that are mechanical rather than motivational.

Every field has a cost

Each additional field is a reason to abandon, and the fields are usually there because somebody in the business wanted the data rather than because the transaction needs it.

1. 01List every field and write beside it what you do with the answer. Anything with no answer comes out.
2. 02Separate what you need now from what you could ask later. A phone number needed to deliver the service can be collected after the enquiry, not before it.
3. 03Delete company size, how did you hear about us as a required field, and anything used only for segmentation you do not act on.
4. 04Make everything that remains required actually required, and mark the optional ones as optional rather than the other way round.

The mechanics that cost completions

• Wrong input types, so a phone shows a letter keyboard for a number field. One attribute each, and it transforms the experience on a phone.
• No autofill support, so a browser cannot complete a name and address it already holds.
• Placeholder text used instead of labels, which disappears as soon as somebody types and leaves them guessing what the field was.
• Validation that fires while typing and tells somebody their email is invalid before they have finished writing it.
• Errors shown only at the top, or only in red, with no indication of which field is wrong.
• A submit button that gives no sign it was pressed, producing double submissions and abandoned attempts.

What happens after submit

The most neglected part. Somebody has just given you their details and is now looking at a page that says thank you, with no indication of whether anything will happen.

1. 01Confirm what you received, specifically enough that they can check it.
2. 02Say when they will hear from you, as a timeframe rather than as soon as possible.
3. 03Say what to do if they do not. An address, a phone number, something.
4. 04Send the same in an email, because the page will be closed and forgotten.

And test the whole path yourself, including what arrives in your own inbox, at least when anything changes. Forms break silently, and a broken form produces no complaints at all, just silence that looks like a quiet month.

Spam, without punishing the honest

The reason most forms get longer and harder. A wave of junk arrives, something gets added to stop it, and the something costs real enquiries.

• A hidden field that a person never sees and an automated submitter fills in. Costs nothing, catches a good deal, and is invisible to every real visitor.
• A check on how fast the form was completed, since nobody types an enquiry in two seconds.
• Server-side validation of the obvious: an email that cannot exist, a message that is a list of links.
• A challenge puzzle only if the first three have failed, and knowing that it costs you completions from people using assistive technology, people on poor connections and people who simply give up.

Long forms, split up

Where a form genuinely has to be long, splitting it into steps usually completes better than one page of thirty fields, provided two things are true: there is a visible indication of how many steps remain, and the easiest questions come first.

The order matters more than the division. Once somebody has answered three easy questions they are considerably more likely to answer a difficult one, and a form that opens with the hardest question loses people who would have finished it.

Where the submission goes

Decide this deliberately, because the default is one person's inbox and that is where enquiries get lost. At minimum it should reach somewhere more than one person can see, be recorded somewhere that is not only email, and produce a record you could search in a year. A form whose only output is a message in a folder will eventually drop an enquiry during a busy week, and you will never know it happened.