Many a CRM customizer has decided to make a bunch of fields on a form required in an effort to force users to at least submit a minimal amount of information when creating a record. But could it be that by requiring many fields you are actually getting less information than if you didn’t require all those fields to be completed?

I came across some research from the University of Cambridge on the voluntary over-disclosure of information in web forms. Researchers found that users completing forms will naturally over-disclose information that is not required when completing web forms. Surprisingly, the more fields on the form that were mandatory to complete the form, the fewer optional fields were completed by users. It seems that mandatory fields get more attention from users, causing them to ignore the optional fields.

Granted, there is a difference between a web form and a CRM form, and there are certain fields that have to be populated for business processes to run successfully, but I think there is a case to be made for limiting unnecessary use of required fields. By requiring many fields, you may be conditioning your users to only submit the minimum amount of information.