What fields to drop from the registration form?

Our current registration form is too long and some fields should be omitted. All of these look important except 'Tell us something about yourself.'

Currently used fields are:

• User



• Password


• Company


• Home Page


• Title


• Position


• Name


• Surname


• e-mail


• Phone


• Country



• State/Province


• City


• Zip/Postal


• Address

Which ones would you recommend dropping?

Answer

All of them except "e-mail" and "Password".

This is the minimum information you need to uniquely identify a user and allow them secure access to your site. The only other piece of vital information would be their address if you were shipping them something - but you can ask for that when they actually order something and not before.

All of the other ones can be asked for on the user's profile page and you can do things like offer rewards (badges like Stack Exchange) or simple nagging (like LinkedIn) for filling them out.

The important part is to get the user to sign up. Once you have done this, then you can encourage them to fill out all the information your sales and marketing department wants.