This is from Nathan Smith, a User Experience Developer in Dallas, Texas.

Asking for information that a user might not have on-hand kills site conversion. I was consulting for a large e-commerce site, and one of the questions they asked potential international travelers was the social security number of those in their traveling party.

When it came to the spouse’s SSN question, we saw a steep drop-off between the hours of 7 a.m. and 6 p.m., outside of which completion was in the high 90 percent range.