A wellness clinic I work with is moving off its old booking software. Part of that job was rebuilding the intake form — the questions a client answers before they book a treatment.
The old form asked eight health-screening questions. Things like whether you have a bleeding disorder, whether you're on blood thinners, whether you've had a fainting episode. For this treatment, those answers matter. They decide whether the session should happen at all.
When I checked the half-built new version, every single one of those questions was optional. A client could tap straight past all eight and book anyway.
Nobody did that on purpose. The questions were sitting right there on the screen. They looked exactly like required questions look. But the setting behind them was off, and the software only shows the little asterisk once you switch it on. The questions existed. The requirement didn't.
Why required fields on forms fail quietly
This is the kind of fault that never announces itself.
A broken checkout screams. A form that collects less than you think it does just keeps working. Bookings come in. The calendar fills. Nothing looks wrong, because nothing is wrong on the surface — you're getting appointments.
You only find out the day someone shows up with a condition you should have known about.
Three things make this happen over and over:
- The default is usually "optional." Most form builders add a new field switched off. You have to turn the requirement on, one field at a time.
- You test your own form as a happy customer. You fill it in properly, because you know the answers, so you never discover you could have skipped them.
- Someone else built it. A form gets set up once, in a hurry, and nobody re-reads it afterwards.
Add those together and you get a form that looks thorough and isn't.
What does your form actually require?
Here's the ten-minute version. Do this on any form that matters — bookings, intake, quote requests, applications.
Open your own form as a stranger
Not the editor. The real, public version, the one your customer sees. The editing view and the live view are different things, and it's the live one that's true.
Try to submit it empty
Type nothing. Hit the button. Whatever the form lets through, that's your actual minimum. Everything else is a suggestion.
I do this before I trust any form, mine or a client's. It takes thirty seconds and it's the only test that can't lie to you.
Ask what a blank answer would cost you
Go field by field and finish this sentence: if this comes in empty, what happens?
For most fields the honest answer is "nothing much." A last name, a preferred time — you can chase those later. For a handful, the answer is serious. On a treatment booking, a missed health question means someone gets a procedure they shouldn't have had. That's the list that has to be mandatory.
Be strict about that list, and only that list. Which brings me to the part people get wrong in the other direction.
Don't fix it by making everything required
The instinct after finding this is to switch every field to mandatory. Resist it.
Every extra required question is a reason for someone to abandon the booking. You're trading customers for tidiness. On the clinic's form we made a deliberate call: the booking form carries only the questions the clinic already asked, nothing invented. The owner's words were to stick to what they had.
We let exactly one change through. There was a single screening question the old system had marked optional — the one asking about infectious disease. That's the question with a real consequence for the practitioner handling equipment afterwards, and it was the only one a client could skip. So it became required. One change, argued for on its own merits, not a blanket sweep.
A form with three mandatory fields that everyone completes beats one with fifteen that people abandon halfway.
The wider habit
I keep meeting this same shape in small businesses. Not a broken system — a system doing something slightly different from what everyone believes it does, and no complaint to tell you.
The same clinic had another one. All eight of its calendars were still pointed at the booking software's stock form, the generic one that collects a name and an email. So the good intake form existed, and nothing was using it. Bookings had been landing all along with no screening attached.
Both faults share a cause: somebody checked that the thing was set up, and nobody checked what it does when a real person uses it.
Once a quarter, go through your own front door as a customer. Book the appointment. Fill in the form badly. Submit the half-empty version. See what your business actually receives, rather than what you remember configuring.
The gap between those two is where the surprises live.
Your form doesn't ask what you think it asks — go and submit an empty one, and find out what it really requires.