Every form has two paths and only one gets tested. The unhappy path is where abandonment happens, and it is entirely composed of things nobody wrote deliberately.
What to put in the public brief
- That the task is deliberately submitting invalid data
- Desktop or mobile
- That a screen recording is required
- Roughly how long
- That no real account or purchase results
Keep the URL and the specific failure list private.
What to put in the private instructions
List the failures to attempt, one per line
Specific and realistic. A name with an apostrophe, a number with spaces, a mismatched confirmation, an oversized upload.
Ask what happened to their correct entries
Whether the form kept them. Clearing valid fields on one error is the single most abandonment-causing behaviour a form has, and it is often invisible to the team because they retype quickly.
Ask them to press back after a failed submit
And report what they find. Lost data at this moment ends the session.
Ask whether they could tell what to fix
Not whether the message was polite. Actionability is the property that matters.
Proof worth requiring
Ask for
The recording, a note per failure on what the form did, and whether previously entered data survived.
Do not ask for
Real personal data as test input. Invented values are sufficient for every case here, and asking someone to submit their own address to trigger a validation error is collecting data you have no reason to hold.
When this task type is the wrong tool
If people abandon before reaching a form field, the problem is earlier and a first-impression test will find it.
If the form works and people still do not complete it, you are looking at what is being asked rather than how, and that is a different conversation with the same customers.