Field-Level Form Optimization for Lead and Quote Forms

Two or three fields account for most of what a form loses, and field-level telemetry finds them in about a week. Not a heatmap, not a replay someone watched over lunch: focus, blur, change, error and abandonment events per input, so you can see the field people enter, delete, re-enter and then leave on. In the last set of French quote forms I worked on, one input — a free-text company address — held more abandonment than the other ten fields combined. The point of finding it is usually to delete it, not to test it: France publishes data that makes several fields unnecessary. A SIRET returns the legal name, registered address and NAF code from the government's open company API. A postcode returns the commune from the Base Adresse Nationale. A national mobile number validates locally, without a paid lookup, once the leading zero and the plus-33 form are handled properly. A field you can derive is a field nobody has to argue about in a test. What gets measured: Submissions are not the metric. I measure to whatever your sales or operations team calls a usable lead, because a shorter form that raises unqualified volume is not a win, it is a cost moved from marketing to sales and then stopped being counted. That means someone from that team is in the first working session. If they will not come, I would rather not take the work. The mechanical layer, which is dull and worth money: Validation on blur rather than on every keystroke. Error text beside the field and repeated in a live region, so a screen reader and a distracted thumb both receive it. Autocomplete tokens that let a browser fill an address in one tap. Inputmode set so a numeric field opens a numeric keypad. Font size at 16 pixels or above on iOS so the page stops zooming when a field takes focus. Touch targets at the 24 by 24 pixel accessibility floor. None of this is an experiment. These are defects, and they arrive on a separate list from anything that needs a test. Consent and personal data: A consent box is unticked or it is not consent, and one box cannot carry both acceptance of terms and agreement to marketing. Session recording on a form holding identity or payment data does not go near your site without field masking and your data protection officer's position in writing. I have declined two engagements over exactly this. Not included: form builder licences, checkout and payment forms, CRM configuration, and copy beyond labels, error messages and helper text. I do not build multi-step wizards by default. A wizard hides length rather than removing it, and on mobile it inserts a network round trip between the person and the thing they came to do. Not for you if: the form takes fewer than about 300 starts a month, in which case there is nothing to read and you should simply fix the defects; or if the brief is a template to apply across twenty forms without looking at any of them. What you get: telemetry running in your own stack rather than in a tool rented from me, a defect list your engineers can ship without my involvement, a derivation plan for the fields that can come out entirely, and — where volume allows — one or two properly powered tests on the changes where reasonable people disagreed.