Forty questions nobody wants to answer, arranged so that each screen only asks about one thing.
A patient intake form was abandoned by roughly half of the people who started it. It was not long by the standards of its sector; it was simply presented as one continuous wall with a progress bar that lied.
If nothing can be removed, the only lever left is grouping and honesty. Questions are grouped by what the person is thinking about, not by which department needs them, and progress is measured in questions answered rather than screens passed.
Reference landscape
- GOV.UK — Right about one thing per page, and about plain language
- Typeform — Right about pace, wrong for anything that must be reviewed
“Group by the person's train of thought, not the org chart.”
Forms are almost always ordered by which internal system consumes the answer. Reordering by the respondent's mental model costs nothing at the database and removes most of the context-switching that makes a form feel long.
Stage by stage
01
Understand
Every field traced to the regulation or workflow requiring it. Six turned out to be requested by nobody.
02
Information architecture
Eight groups, each answering one question the respondent already has in mind.
What was difficult
A progress bar over branching questions is a promise you cannot keep.
Progress counts answered questions against the maximum remaining, so it can slow down but never go backwards — the failure mode people actually punish.
Exactly what you get
- Figma source
- 8 steps
- Validation states
- React + Tailwind
- Version
- 1.0.0
- Formats
- Figma, React, Tailwind
- Screens
- 8
- Components
- 24
- Dark mode
- Yes
- Prototype
- Yes
- Accessibility
- AA
Dependencies
- Inter — SIL Open Font Licence — included
Commercial fonts are never redistributed — they are named and linked, with a free equivalent substituted in the delivered files.
Completion rose without a single question being removed.