One signup field is enough

The signup form had five fields. Email, password, name, country, what you wanted to use the product for. Each of them was, on its own, a reasonable thing to know. Together, they were the reason a meaningful share of people did not finish signing up.

What I cut#

I cut everything except email. No password — magic link. No name — we can ask later. No country — we can detect or ask in context. No "what you wanted to use the product for" — that is the question the first session is supposed to answer.

The form is now one input and one button.

What happened#

Signup completion went up by about half. The shape of who signed up did not change — it was not bots — but the friction that had been quietly filtering out perfectly good prospects went away.

The interesting metric was retention. The people who signed up with one field activated at the same rate as the people who had signed up with five. The four extra fields had not been qualifying anyone. They had just been filtering out the impatient, who were not a worse class of user.

What I would do again#

I would design the next product's signup as one field from day one, and add a second only when I could prove a number was worse without it. The default direction for forms should be subtraction.