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Contact forms on mobile
By the time somebody reaches your enquiry form, the hard part of the sale is already done. Most forms spend the next thirty seconds undoing it.
About 9 minutes
The short version
Somebody who has scrolled to the bottom of your website and found the enquiry form has already done the hard part. They have decided you probably do the thing, they have decided you can probably be trusted with it, and they have decided to start a conversation about it. That is the whole sale, done, for free, before they touched a single box.
It also matters enormously that they are holding a phone. Sat at a desk, with a keyboard already under their hands, most people will just fill the thing in. On a phone the same person looks at the same form and thinks: I will do that later.
Later does not come. They are in a shop, or in the car, or on the lounge with the television on, and later means the next time your business happens to cross their mind. Which is usually never, because by then somebody else has answered the phone.
Then the form undoes it, and not through laziness or bad design in any obvious sense. It is that a contact form is almost always built backwards. It gets designed around what the business needs on file, and then pointed at the customer, so the customer ends up doing the filing. On a desktop that is tolerable. On a phone, with one thumb and a keyboard covering half of what you are trying to read, it is a task.
What it usually is
Paperwork
A set of things we need before we will talk to you, arranged in the order our system likes them.
What it should be
The start of a conversation
The two or three things somebody would say out loud in the first few seconds of ringing you, and nothing else.
The test that decides almost every question in this piece is the same one: if somebody rang your mobile right now, what would you ask them before you were happy to help? It is a much shorter list than the form, and you already know it by heart.
No single field is the problem. That is what makes this hard to see: each one was added for a sensible reason, by somebody sensible, on a day when the form had four boxes on it and one more seemed harmless.
They compound, though. Every box is a small ask, and a phone screen shows them stacked one on top of the other so the visitor can see exactly how much work is in front of them before they start any of it.
Company name
The database, on a form that half your customers fill in from their kitchen.
How did you hear about us?
Your marketing report. It is a genuinely useful answer, and it is a question for after they are a customer.
Preferred contact method
Nobody. You already have their number, or their email, and they will answer whichever one you use.
Budget range
Qualifying. It also asks somebody to guess a number before they know what anything costs, which is the moment most people leave.
Postcode and suburb and street address
The quote. Three boxes for one fact, when the job may not even be at their house.
Message
The customer. This is the one they came to fill in.
The usual defence of a long form is that it keeps out the time wasters. It does not. Somebody with nothing better to do has all the time in the world to fill in eleven boxes.
The person a long form actually removes is the one who is busy, decided, and holding a phone in one hand, which is a fairly precise description of your best customer.
Marking a field required is a small negotiation with somebody who did not agree to negotiate. If a field is genuinely optional, consider whether it needs to be on the form at all rather than sitting there as one more thing to read and decide about. If it is required, it should be obvious why.
Almost every contact form opens with name, then email, then phone, and puts the message box at the bottom. That is the order a database wants. It is the opposite of the order a person would speak in.
Nobody rings a business and opens with their surname. They open with the problem, because the problem is why they rang, and they give you their details afterwards once it is clear you can help.
There is also a plain momentum argument for it. Somebody who has answered the first question is a person part-way through something. Somebody staring at an empty name box is still a person deciding whether to begin, and those are two completely different states of mind to be asking a favour in.
This is the part that never gets looked at, because it cannot be seen on the machine the form was built on. The moment somebody taps a box on a phone, the keyboard slides up and takes roughly half the screen with it. Everything that was in the bottom half is now gone, and the form is being used in a window a third the size of the one it was designed in.
Which is fine, as long as somebody has actually looked at it in that state. Usually nobody has.
Tap a phone number field and you should get a number pad. Tap an email field and the keyboard should already have the at sign on it. When that does not happen it is because the box was built as plain text, and the cost is that somebody has to go and find the numbers on a letter keyboard while standing up.
The same setting is what lets a phone offer to fill the field in from its own saved details, which turns four fields into one tap. It is invisible when it works and quietly expensive when it does not.
A dropdown on a laptop is a small menu. On a phone it is a full-screen wheel that covers the form, has to be scrolled, confirmed and dismissed, and leaves the person somewhere slightly different from where they were.
Every dropdown is a little journey away from the form and back. Two or three options are better as buttons you can see all at once.
The common failure is a form that answers a bad submission by putting one line of red text at the very top of the page, well above where the person is looking, and often behind the keyboard. From where they are sitting, the button simply did not work.
An error belongs next to the box it is about, in words that say what to do rather than what went wrong. And it should never be the first time somebody learns a rule: if the phone number has to be in a particular shape, the form should say so before they type, not after.
The last thing a form does is the most neglected. A page that reloads to a small grey line saying Thank you, your message has been sent, leaves somebody who has just handed over their phone number with no idea whether a person has it or when anybody will reply.
Say both. It costs one sentence and it is the difference between a lead and a lead who is still waiting on you rather than ringing somebody else.
About ten minutes, on your phone, off wi-fi. Nothing here is ticked off or scored, and there is nothing to send anybody. It is eight things to go and look at, and most people find the answer to their own question somewhere in the middle of them.
If that was useful, the same idea applied to a whole website is the sixteen-check cheatsheet. That one does keep a count, because it is a tool rather than a piece of writing.
All of this comes down to one instruction.
Just let them talk to you.Plenty of forms are fine. If you went through those eight without wincing at any of them, then your enquiry form is not the reason the phone is quiet, and changing it will not make it ring.
Do not let anybody sell you a rebuild on the strength of it, and that includes me. Go and look at what is happening further back: whether people are finding you at all, and whether the page they land on says the thing they came to check.
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