Rewriting intake for first-timers

The hardest part of therapy is often the sign-up form. Ours asked too much, too soon — and people who were already nervous simply closed the tab.

The situation

Our own intake ran to nineteen fields across four screens, including a risk questionnaire, an insurance section and a free-text box headed “What brings you here?”. It had been designed to save clinicians time in the first session. It was costing us the first session entirely.

Session recordings showed the pattern clearly. People who had never been to therapy stalled on the same two things: the free-text box, and the point at which the form asked for payment details before naming a price.

What we changed

We rebuilt the first five minutes around reassurance rather than data collection, on the principle that anything a clinician could ask in session did not belong in a form.

• Nineteen fields cut to six. Everything else moved into the first conversation or a follow-up email.

• The free-text box replaced with a short list of plain-language options, plus an explicit “I’m not sure yet” — the option people chose most.

• Pricing shown in full before any payment step, with the cancellation terms beside it rather than behind a link.

• A visible progress indicator and an honest time estimate, so the form stopped feeling open-ended.

• Risk screening moved to a clinician-led step, where a person can respond to what is said.

What happened

Drop-off during intake fell by nearly a third. Completion improved most sharply among people with no prior experience of therapy, which was the group the change was aimed at.

Clinicians expected to lose useful context and did not. First sessions ran slightly longer on average, but arrived with less to undo — fewer people turned up braced for an assessment they felt they had already half-failed.

In their words

“I’d started the old form twice and given up both times. The new one didn’t ask me to explain myself before I’d even met anyone.”

— Client, first course of therapy

Where it goes next

The same six questions now front our referral partners’ routes, so someone arriving from a GP or a university service meets one intake rather than two.

[PLACEHOLDER — figures illustrative; confirm before publishing.]