How Many Fields Before People Give Up

What a field actually costs

Each one is a small request for effort, and a slightly larger request for trust.

Some are trivially easy. A name costs nothing. Some are effortful, like a full address on a phone. Some are uncomfortable, like a phone number given to a business you have not yet decided to use.

The cost is not uniform, which is why counting fields is a poor measure. Three uncomfortable fields lose more people than six easy ones.

The test for each field

Not whether the information is useful. Whether you can respond usefully without it.

If you can, the field belongs in the conversation rather than the form. Ask when you reply, by which point the person has committed and is happy to tell you.

Most forms fail this test in three or four places, because they were designed around what the business would like to know rather than what it needs to begin.

The fields that usually earn their place

• A name, so the reply is not addressed to nobody.
• One contact route, email or phone, whichever suits your trade.
• What they want, in a free text box.

For a great many small businesses that is the whole form, and it converts better than anything longer.

The free text box does more work than any structured field. People explain their situation in their own words, which tells you more than a dropdown ever could.

The fields that usually do not

Being specific, because these appear on most forms.

Both email and phone as required. Ask for one and let them add the other if they want.

Full postal address, at enquiry stage. You need the town, not the postcode and street.

How did you hear about us, which is for your benefit and slightly annoying to answer honestly.

Budget, which most people cannot answer and some find presumptuous before any conversation.

Preferred contact time, which you will ignore anyway.

Company name, when most enquirers are individuals.

A worked example

A window company whose form had nine fields, seven of them required: name, email, phone, address, postcode, property type, number of windows, preferred timeframe, and a message box.

The reasoning was that a complete enquiry meant a better first call.

Cutting it to name, phone, and a message box produced roughly double the submissions. The enquiries were less complete and there were far more of them.

The information they had been collecting was gathered on the phone in ninety seconds, during a call they were now having twice as often.

What they lost was the ability to pre-sort enquiries before speaking to anybody. What they gained was more people to speak to, which turned out to be the better trade for a business with capacity.

The counter-case

Where a longer form is genuinely correct.

When you have more enquiries than capacity, and the cost of a bad one is a wasted site visit. Then qualifying fields are doing useful work and losing some enquiries is the point.

When the information is genuinely required to respond at all, such as a vehicle registration for a parts enquiry.

When the enquiry is complex enough that a structured form saves the customer explaining everything twice.

And where regulation requires collecting something specific before you can advise.

The distinction is whether you are short of enquiries or short of good ones. Those need opposite forms, and most businesses copy the wrong one.

Required against optional

A cheap improvement that most forms get backwards.

Marking a field optional does not remove its cost entirely, and it removes most of it. People skip optional fields without anxiety and complete the form.

So the rule is: if you would still respond without it, make it optional rather than removing it. You will get the information from perhaps half of people at no cost to completions.

What does not work is marking everything required because it seems tidier, which is the default in most form builders and the reason so many forms ask for everything.

Field types and the phone keyboard

A small technical point with a real effect on mobile.

A field set to expect a number brings up the number keypad. One set to expect an email address brings up a keyboard with the at symbol.

Fields left as plain text bring up the standard keyboard for everything, which makes entering a phone number slower and more error-prone.

It takes a minute to set and it measurably reduces mistyped contact details, which are enquiries you cannot answer.

Validation that helps rather than blocks

The other common source of abandonment.

Overly strict rules reject valid input: phone numbers with spaces, postal codes without them, names with apostrophes or accents.

Somebody rejected twice usually leaves rather than experimenting with formats, and they leave without telling you why.

Accept what people type and tidy it yourself. The only validation worth enforcing is that a required field is not empty and an email address contains the right shape.

Two forms rather than one

An arrangement worth knowing about, since it resolves the tension between volume and qualification.

A short form everywhere, asking three things. And a longer one, linked from it, for anybody who would rather give you the detail up front.

Most people take the short route. A minority prefer to explain everything at once and are pleased to be offered the option.

The short form is the default because it should be; the long one exists for people who want it rather than being imposed on everybody.

The same logic applies to a quote request against a general enquiry. Those are different intents and forcing both through one form serves neither well.

What to do with your own form

1. Count the fields and mark which are required.
2. For each, ask whether you could reply without it.
3. Remove or make optional everything that fails.
4. Check the field types for phone and email.
5. Fill it in on a phone with an awkward name and a spaced phone number.
6. Compare submissions over the following month.

The fifth finds problems the other five miss, and it takes two minutes. Use a real name with an apostrophe in it, because that is the validation rule most often written badly.

Whether the submission then arrives at all is covered in the enquiry that never arrived.

Frequently asked questions

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