What a year of carrier onboarding taught me about forms

The product I ran for two years was, on paper, a way for trucking companies to sign up and start hauling loads. In practice it was a form. A long one. My whole job became the study of who abandons a form and where.

The first thing I learned is that people do not abandon forms because they are long. They abandon them at the first field they cannot answer from memory. A DOT number, an insurance policy number, the name of a person at the bank. Every one of those fields sends someone to a filing cabinet, and half of them never come back.

So we moved those fields to the end, told people up front what they would need, and let them save and return. Completion went up by a third. Nothing about the form got shorter.

The second thing I learned is that the ops team on the other side reads every answer, and they had opinions about which ones mattered. We had been asking for a fax number. Nobody had used it in years. Cutting it took a two-line change and a two-month argument.

The third thing is that a form is a conversation you are having with someone who cannot interrupt you. If you would not ask a question in person, do not ask it on a screen.

I keep a list of the questions we cut. It is longer than the form.