The four fields people abandon

I have watched around 400 people fill in forms while narrating what they are thinking. Most abandonment is not caused by length. It is caused by four specific fields, and they are the same four almost every time.

Phone number. Not the field itself — the format. A form that rejects the number because of a space, a plus sign or a leading zero teaches the person that the computer is being difficult, and the first thing they lose is patience. One participant tried five formats of her own number before giving up. The fix is to strip everything that is not a digit and validate what is left. It takes one line. Almost nobody writes it.

Password requirements shown after the fact. Someone types a password, submits, and is told it needs a capital letter, a digit and a symbol. They now have to invent a new one on the spot, which means they will forget it, which means they will reset it next week. Show the rules before they start typing, and mark them off as each one is met.

From 40 usability sessions on banking and health forms: the specific moments where people give up.

Address, when the form asks for it in the wrong order. Every country writes an address differently, and a form that demands house number, then street, then district, in a country where people say the street first, makes them stop and translate. In Lagos sessions this was the single most common point of hesitation — an average of eleven seconds staring at the field before typing.

Date of birth as three dropdowns. Nineteen taps on a phone to enter something the person could type in six keystrokes. Watching someone scroll to 1974 in a dropdown list is watching a design decision cost real time. Let them type it. Parse it afterwards.

None of these are hard problems. That is the uncomfortable part. They persist because nobody on the team ever fills in the form as a stranger would — they test with their own name, their own number, and a password they already have written down. Sit with five people who have never seen it and every one of these shows up in the first hour.