The Halfway Houdini
Abandonus formularis
Appearance
Caught mid-flight, always. Wings spread, body angled away from the screen. Has typically completed 60–70% of a form before the decision to leave.
Habitat
Signup flows. Checkout forms. Anywhere a credit-card field appears later than expected. The Halfway Houdini has a marked preference for the second-to-last field of any multi-step form.
Field notes
The Halfway Houdini arrives in good faith. It completes name, email, and company. Then it encounters something it did not expect: a "How did you hear about us?" dropdown with no fitting option, a phone-number field marked required, a CAPTCHA. And, it's gone.
Resolution
Almost never returns to complete the original form. Occasionally returns to a different form on the same product, days later, as if the original encounter never happened. You probably won't even recognize it if it does.
Hazards observed
Required fields are perceived as intrusive. Unexpected friction at the conversion moment. A field-validation error that resets all prior entries. The discovery, mid-form, that a credit card will be required.
If you spot one
Form abandonment comes down to one field far more often than to the length of the form, and it tends to be the field nobody on the team wanted to add: a required phone number, a CAPTCHA, or a dropdown with no option that fits. Fill in your own signup and notice where you would hesitate. A Classifier scanner asked which field the user was on when they quit tags each abandoned session with the culprit, and sorting those tags by frequency ranks your worst offenders.