Required fields: asking for less and getting better data

Every required field on a form is a small toll. Some are worth charging — without an email address you cannot reply — and most are charged out of hope rather than need. The cost is not only abandonment: a field somebody cannot answer honestly gets answered dishonestly, and invented data is worse than a blank, because a blank is visibly missing and an invention is not.

Which required fields earn it

• Anything without which you cannot act at all — a way to reply, the subject of the request.
• Anything with legal weight: consent, a declaration, an acknowledgement.
• A value that routes the form, because an unrouted submission waits for somebody to triage it by hand.
• Not "how did you hear about us" — useful, frequently mandatory, and the most commonly falsified field on the internet.
• Not anything the person is unlikely to know at the moment of filling in. Ask for it later, when they do.

What a mandatory field costs

Three things, in increasing order of damage. Some people abandon the form, which you can measure. Some complete it with whatever passes validation, which you cannot — "N/A", a zero, the first option in the list. And some answer approximately when the field demanded precision, which produces data that looks clean and is quietly wrong. The third is the one that corrupts reporting, and it is caused almost entirely by asking for precision at a moment when the person does not have it.

Count how many fields are required, then halve it as an exercise and see which removals you actually regret. Most forms survive the halving, and the ones that do not identify the fields that genuinely mattered.

Better than making it required

1. Derive it — the date, the submitter and often the account are already known to you.
2. Default it sensibly, so the common case needs no action and the exception is a deliberate change.
3. Split the form: ask the minimum to start, and ask the rest once the thing exists and the person is invested.
4. Offer "I do not know" as an explicit answer, which is honest data rather than a blank or an invention.
5. Validate format rather than presence where you can — a correctly shaped answer matters more than a filled box.

Review them on a schedule

Fields accumulate. Each one was added for a reason, usually by somebody who needed it once, and almost nothing is ever removed because removal feels like losing data. Look at completion rates per field annually: anything with a high rate of identical values is being filled in to get past it, and anything optional with a near-zero completion rate can go.

Ettex Forms makes the distinction visible — required, optional and derived — so a form can be audited by looking at it rather than by filling it in. Where the data behind a field matters more than the form, the discipline carries over into the register it feeds, with the same argument about free text against a short list of values.