The Heritage Foundation

How a two-step form reduced affects cognitive friction and conversion

Experiment ID: #2039

The Heritage Foundation

Founded in 1973, The Heritage Foundation is a research and educational institution—a think tank—whose mission is to formulate and promote conservative public policies based on the principles of free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, traditional American values, and a strong national defense.

Experiment Summary

Timeframe: 08/10/2015 - 09/09/2015

For The Heritage Foundation’s Presidents’ Club Meeting registration, we wanted to find a way to increase the number of attendees to the event. Historically, the forms had all been a single page with all of the data capture fields required before someone could register. These fields included selecting each session they would like to attend and entering all of their information into the form.

We had the hypothesis that if we moved the process to a two-step process, it would create less friction in the visitor’s minds since the forms would be shorter. This two step process would also allow us to look up the donor’s information (based upon their email address or ID) and use this to pre-populate the second form.  We were able to not only fill in their address information but also pre-select the sessions that their membership level qualified for.  We wanted to see if this process would lead to an increased number of completed registrations.

Research Question

Will a two-step form allow for the capture of more information compared to a single page form that acquired all of the information at one time?

Design

C: Single Page Process
T1: Two Step Process

Results

 Treatment NameConv. RateRelative DifferenceConfidence
C: Single Page Process 17.6%
T1: Two Step Process 35.2%99.4% 99.7%

This experiment has a required sample size of 49 in order to be valid. Since the experiment had a total sample size of 210, and the level of confidence is above 95% the experiment results are valid.

Flux Metrics Affected

The Flux Metrics analyze the three primary metrics that affect revenue (traffic, conversion rate, and average gift). This experiment produced the following results:

    0% increase in traffic
× 99.4% increase in conversion rate
× 0% increase in average gift

Key Learnings

The two step form led to a 99% increase in the number of donors completing their registration information. This increase is the result of more than just the two step form; the ability to pre-fill the donor’s information into the second form would have significantly reduced the friction associated with the process. This reduction in friction made the form easier to understand end simpler to fill out.


Experiment Documented by NextAfter

Question about experiment #2039

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