Design for specification abandonment
Find the question or stage where customers stop, and establish whether it is unclear, premature, intrusive or simply unnecessary.
- Evidence
- Established practice. Widely and independently practised across commerce. Nothing here is a Specify discovery; these are the ideas most likely to be uncontroversial and least likely to be exciting.
- Difficulty
- Small. Difficulty is an initial editorial assessment of how much work an idea usually takes, not a guaranteed estimate for your systems. A change that is small in one storefront can be significant in another because of where the data lives.
The commercial problem
Multi-step journeys are usually measured at the end. A completion rate says how many finished; it does not say which step ended it for everyone else, and teams frequently improve the wrong screen as a result.
Why it matters
Abandonment is rarely evenly distributed. It usually concentrates on one or two questions, and the cause is frequently that the question was asked too early or should not have been asked at all.
Where it applies
- Configurators and specification flows
- Multi-step enquiry and quotation forms
- Checkout, where the same reasoning applies and is better studied
Suggested implementation
- Record progression per step rather than only completion.
- For the worst step, ask which of four causes applies: unclear, premature, intrusive, or unnecessary.
- Test removing the question before testing rewording it. Removal is the change most often skipped.
- Check the step with a keyboard and a screen reader before concluding that the problem is the wording.
Risks and constraints
- Removing a question that a downstream process depends on moves the cost rather than removing it.
- Optimising for completion can produce more submissions with less usable information.
- Low volume makes step-level rates noisy and easy to over-read.
What to measure
- Progression rate per step, not only overall completion
- The quality of what arrives, not only the quantity
- Whether the worst step is still the worst step after the change
How this relates to Specify
Relevant to any specification journey. This is one of the first things a Request Readiness Sprint looks at when a flow already exists.
Related ideas
Start with evidence
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