See where people give up on your form

The numbers you get

Forms 365 Web keeps per-form analytics: how many times the form was loaded, how many submissions came back, the completion rate between those two, and the typical time the people who finished took. Four numbers, and between them they answer the question that matters, which is whether the form is doing its job or quietly losing people.

Completion rate is the one to watch

Loads and submits are easy to misread on their own. A form with few submissions might simply not be getting shared. Completion rate strips that out: of the people who did open it, how many finished. When that number is low, they arrived willing and left anyway, which is a design problem rather than a promotion problem.

What a low completion rate usually means

Time on form describes the people who finished, so it is a good sanity check on whether a form is as quick as you assume, but it explains nothing about the ones who left. Completion rate is the signal that someone left. Finding out where is a job for reading the form yourself. The cause is nearly always one of these:

• The form is too long to face. Plenty of loads and few submissions on a visibly long form means people opened it, saw the scroll bar, and closed it.
• Something in the middle blocks them. A poor completion rate on a form that is genuinely short points at one field people cannot answer, or a validation message they cannot get past. Walk the form as a real submitter would and you will normally hit it yourself.
• You are asking too much, too early. Requiring detail up front that people need to go and look up gives them a reason to leave and not come back.

What to change

Each of those has a fix that costs an hour, not a redesign.

For a form that is simply too long, split it into steps. A multi-page wizard shows people a manageable screen at a time and tends to move completion more than any amount of rewording.

For a form that asks irrelevant questions, use conditional logic so each person only sees what applies to them. The fastest way to shorten a form is to stop showing most of it to most people.

For a form people get stuck in, check the validation messages. A rule that rejects an answer without saying why is one of the most reliable ways to lose somebody two thirds of the way through.

Then measure again

Change one thing and watch the completion rate rather than changing four things at once. With a single change you learn which one mattered, and on a form that runs for months that knowledge carries to the next form you build.