Form abandonment is a situation where a visitor starts filling in a form but does not submit it. Unlike ignoring the form altogether, this is the loss of people who have already shown interest, which is why it is the most valuable area for improvement. The cause can be found by measuring at the level of individual fields: tracking which field people most often stop at, how long they linger on it, and how many times they correct it. Fields that repeatedly cause problems include the phone number, which people are reluctant to give, open-ended questions requiring thought, fields with a strict format, and questions whose purpose is not obvious. The solution is to remove the field, make it optional, or add an explanation of what the data will be used for and what happens after submission. Shortening a form by a single problematic field brings, in practice, a bigger effect than any visual redesign.
See also: Form optimisation, Form validation, Friction in the conversion process.
