On forms that ask too much

Most forms ask for more than they need. The cure is not better validation, smoother error messages, or progressive disclosure. The cure is to delete fields.

This sounds obvious. It is not, in practice, what most teams do. The default response to a form that has a low completion rate is to add helpful microcopy under each field. To split the form into multiple steps. To add a progress bar. To add a “save and continue later” button. All of these treat the symptom (the user is abandoning) without addressing the cause (the form is asking for things the user is not ready to give).

A few specific patterns I see in forms that ask too much.

Phone number on a contact form. The site has a single contact form that is the entry point for prospects, customers, partners, journalists, recruiters, and lost visitors who clicked the wrong link. The form asks for a phone number on the assumption that the team wants to call back. In practice, the team almost never calls back. The phone number field is doing nothing except suppressing completion.

The fix is to delete the field, or to mark it optional in a way that makes the optional-ness visible from across the room.

Company name on a sign-up form for a B2B product. The sales team asks for the company name. The signup form asks for the company name. Half the legitimate users do not know what to put in the field. They are signing up to evaluate the product. They have not yet decided whether their company is going to use it. The field is asking them to commit before they are ready.

The fix is to ask for the company name later in the funnel, after the user has signed up and started using the product.

Postcode on a newsletter signup. A surprising number of small-business newsletters ask for a postcode. The reason given, when asked, is “for analytics” or “for personalisation”. Neither use case justifies the cost of asking. The postcode field is, in most cases, the field that doubles the dropout rate of the form.

The fix is to delete the field. If you genuinely need geographic data, infer it from the IP address on submission.

Confirm-email-address fields. The argument for these is that users mistype their email address. The argument is true. The user response to a “confirm email” field is to copy the value from the first field and paste it into the second, which defeats the purpose. The form is now asking the user to do clerical work to compensate for a mistake the user is going to make anyway.

The fix is to send a confirmation email after signup, with a verification link. The user finds out about the typo when the email does not arrive. They retry. The conversion rate of the form is unchanged. The user experience is improved.

The “tell us about yourself” textarea on a job application. The applicant has already submitted a CV. The CV contains the information being asked for. The textarea is asking the applicant to rewrite their CV in a different format, for the convenience of the team filtering the applications. It is, technically, free labour extracted from the applicant.

The fix is to delete the textarea, or to replace it with a single specific question that the CV cannot answer (“why this role at this company”). The applications get better. The completion rate goes up.

The pattern across all five: the field is asking for something the form does not need at the moment of asking. Deleting the field improves the form by every measure.

A practical exercise. The next form you ship, before launch, walk through each field with the question: what is this field for, and would the form still work without it? Most forms have at least one field that fails the test. Some forms have several. Delete them.

The single best book on this is Forms that Work by Caroline Jarrett and Gerry Gaffney. From 2009. The principles have not aged. Most current writing on form design is downstream of this book.

GOV.UK’s design system on forms is the cleanest set of working examples I have come across; almost every public form in the UK is, increasingly, a footnote to it. Adam Silver writing on form design is the longer-form treatment from someone who has been making the same arguments for a decade.

The form that asks the least is, almost always, the form that converts the best. The studios that handle this well treat every field as a cost the user is being asked to pay. The studios that do not, ship forms with eleven fields and wonder why nobody finishes them.