CogBlog

A couple of days ago we were in a meeting with a client, and we were talking about site usability and the kind of impact a required registration form might have on site visitors. Now, one of the basics tenets of site usability is that the more hoops you force a user to jump though, the less often they will complete a given task. We've seen many, many examples of this over the years, but I thought it might be interesting to profile one simple example.

Last year, we wanted to improve conversion rates on a site generating leads for condominium reservations. We drove well targeted visitors to the site via sponsored search, and they would ultimately reach this availability request form:

Conversion Rate: 11.04%

About 11% of visitors reaching this form would ultimately go on to complete it. Now, that's not too bad really, but we thought it could be improved. So, we did a quick split test with some re-arrangement of some of the form elements. Specifically we wanted to test:

• Form Length: What would be the impact of reducing the amount of required information. Intuitively we know that will improve conversion, but by how much.
• Radio Buttons vs. Select Menu: We thought we could shorten the form even more by moving our # of bedrooms selection to a pull-down select menu.

Here were our test forms:

Version 1: Same number of form elements, changed bedrooms to a pull down menu, re-arranged the head section putting the bedroom selection in a second column.

Version 2: Used the new shortened top section, and reduced the number of form elements. This was the overall shortest version tested.

Version 3: Here we used the original head section, and the shortened bottom section.

The Results : A 94% Improvement

So, our changes definitely had an impact on conversion, ultimately leading to a 94% improvement. But not all changes were positive. Our changes to the head section actually decreased conversion rates, while our shortened for dramatically increased them.

Here are the conversion rates for each version:

Version	Conversion Rate
Control	11.04%
Version 1	6.43%
Version 2	14.67%
Version 3	21.43%

Version 3 --original head section, and short form-- is the clear winner.

Our revised head section actually hurt conversion rates when all else was the same, lowering the short form from 21.43% to 14.67%, and the long form from 11.04% to 6.43%. And, it makes sense that they did since we did two things wrong from a usability perspective. First, we used select menus instead of radio buttons. Select menus hide all available options from a user until they click on the menu itself, and it requires at least two clicks to operate instead of the one for a radio button. Second, we changed from a simple left-justified top-to-bottom order of completion on the form, to a partial two-column format. We've seen this before that people prefer a clear top-to-bottom ordering on a form.

The shortening of the form by reducing the number of elements was the big takeaway from this quick test. That one simple change effectively doubled conversion rates.

One side-note of this is, that even at our improved rates, the form itself is still clearly a barrier. Four out of five visitors are turned back at this point even though they were interested enough to search->read our ad->click the link->then choose check availability in the site navigation. Now, it may be that you are only filtering out those who are not serious prospects, but it would likely be worth some additional testing to explore other options.