Why conversational forms get more answers

You have a form with eight questions on it. Half the people who open it leave without answering anything. The questions are fine — you've read them back and they're all things you genuinely need to know. So what's actually going wrong?

Almost always, the answer is that the decision to start and the decision to finish are two different decisions, and a long form asks for both at once.

The first screen is the whole game

When somebody opens a standard form, they see every field at the same time. Before reading a single question they've already estimated how long this will take, and they've made a yes-or-no call on whether it's worth it. That estimate is made in about a second, from the shape of the page rather than the content of it.

The estimate is also pessimistic. A page of empty boxes reads as work in a way that eight short questions asked one at a time doesn't, even when it's the same eight questions.

Nothing about the questions changes. What changes is how much work they look like before anyone has typed a character.

A conversational form breaks the decision in two. The first screen asks for one small thing, which is easy to say yes to. Every question after that is negotiated separately, and by then the person has already started — which is a very different position to be in.

Why starting matters more than it should

Once someone has answered two questions, quitting starts to feel like wasting the effort they've already put in. That's not a trick anyone invented for forms; it's just how people behave about things they've begun. The practical consequence is that the cost of the first question is wildly disproportionate to the cost of the seventh.

Which suggests an obvious tactic, and one obvious mistake.

• The tactic: make question one nearly free. A tap, not a paragraph. "What should we call you?" or a five-option pick, never "Tell us about your goals".
• The mistake: putting your hardest, longest question first because it's the one you care about most. That question belongs in the middle, once someone is committed.

Typing is where responses die

Most of your responses arrive on a phone. On a phone, typing is genuinely unpleasant — a soft keyboard covers half the screen, autocorrect is fighting you, and you're probably doing it one-handed in a queue somewhere.

So every open text box in your form is a place where someone might stop. That doesn't mean deleting the open questions; the answers to those are usually the ones worth having. It means being deliberate about how many of them there are, and offering a tap wherever a tap will do.

The number that's actually useful

Completion rate tells you there's a problem. It doesn't tell you where. The number that changes what you do next is per-question drop-off: of the people who reached question five, how many answered it?

That one number usually points straight at a single question — the one asking for a phone number, or the open-ended one in third position, or the required field that should have been optional. Cutting or moving that question tends to do more than any amount of redesign.

This is also why partial responses matter beyond the analytics. If your form only records a response when somebody presses submit, the people who quit at question four are invisible to you, and they're precisely the people whose behaviour you needed to see.

Don't trust anyone's numbers, including ours

You will find a lot of confident claims online about conversational forms lifting completion rates by some specific percentage. Treat them the way you'd treat any vendor's number: it came from someone's particular audience, form and moment, and there's no reason it transfers to yours.

The good news is that this is unusually cheap to test properly. Build the same questions in both shapes, send each to half your list, and compare.

1. 1Write the questions once. Don't improve them for one version — you'd be testing two things at once.
2. 2Split the list randomly, and send both at the same time of day. Day of week moves response rates more than most people expect.
3. 3Wait for a full week before reading it. Weekend traffic behaves differently from Tuesday traffic.
4. 4Compare completion rate, but also compare answer quality. A form that gets more finishes and shorter, emptier answers hasn't won anything.

When a long form is the right answer

If your respondent is already committed — they're an employee, they're mid-purchase, they need the thing on the other side of the form — a single page of fields is faster for them and simpler for you. Conversational pacing helps people who might leave. It just gets in the way of people who won't.

The shape of the form should follow how much the person wants to be there. Which, for most forms sent to customers, prospects and candidates, is: not very much.