You know you do it. We all do. It's not our fault, really.

I'm talking of course about abandoning forms on web sites.

Form abandonment has long been a concern in registration systems, where statistics square with the common sense notion that users simply quit in the middle of overly long or tedious forms. There's a delicate tension between getting useful information and driving potential community members away. Finding the right balance between those poles is part art and part science, and the science part depends on getting the some metrics.

But this post is not about registration systems, it's about rich community-generated reviews. Pluck's robust Reviews Application not only allows the expected text inputs, such as pro/con fields and a long-form body input, as well as the ubiquitous star rating, it also lets administrators add other rating dimensions plus author-identifying attributes.

An example of review rating dimensions for a computer might be cost, CPU performance, graphics performance, and disk capacity. Tech-centric author-identifying attributes could include a radio button choice of "power user" and "casual user", a multiple-choice field describing how the reviewer uses the product (with selections like "graphics professional" and "gamer"), and a checkbox for whether they use the computer with kids.

These attributes pay dividends with higher conversion rates or loyalty to the site. Decision makers will pay much more heed to the GPU performance rating on reviews left by fellow gamers than the aggregate of all reviews. Pluck's Reviews app allows guests to filter reviews by multiple criteria, so they can quickly drill into the information they'll find useful to their purchase decision.

There is a potential downside, of course: now our very useful review form has a dozen fields. While most of them are not required, the mental friction confronting the user as they leave a review might lead to a tl;dr situation, meaning you get fewer reviews submitted. But how do you know whether adding or removing fields materially affected contribution rates?

This is why Pluck introduced form abandonment tracking in our Reviews. Now when a user decides to quit the review-writing process -- whether by clicking "Cancel" on our form, or simply navigating away -- we record not only the fact that they left, but how many fields they had interacted with and how many were in the form. The report itself is simple but incredibly powerful. Gathering the data needed for A/B testing (or simply before-and-after analysis) is just automatic. Whereas typically the only signal for understanding how changes affect activity would be changes in the number of reviews -- which is nothing more than a hint, considering that fluctuations and noise are normal in this metric -- our Reviews Application offers very direct insight into form design and completion rates.

As with the entire Pluck platform, form abandonment tracking is available through our 6 SDKs, meaning the built-in report can be extended to any form on your site, regardless of whether the content is stored in Pluck.

Businesses and community managers need insight into their users, and users delight in the ability to self-identify and to find content from users like them. The trick is to find the sweet spot for the right amount of information, versus overloading guests with excise that drives them away. Pluck's form abandonment tracking gives analysts and designers a powerful new tool for finding that sweet spot.