An intake form for a coaching institute
A form for parent enquiries that stores each one, and gives you one page per student to read back before you pick up the phone.
You run a coaching institute or tuition centre and enquiries currently arrive as WhatsApp messages you scroll to find.
Describe the work, not the interface
The temptation is to specify screens. Describe the job instead — the agent is better at choosing an interface for a well-described job than at assembling one from a list of components.
I run Ashirwad Classes, a coaching institute in Raipur. Build me an enquiry form for parents that asks the student's name, their class — 9th, 10th or 11th — the exam they are preparing for, the batch timing they'd prefer, how they heard about us, and their yearly budget in rupees. Each enquiry should become its own page I can open and read, and I need to see which ones are new.
"Which ones are new" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. It's the difference between a table of rows and something a front desk can actually be run from.
What it did
A short form parents can finish on a phone, an enquiries table, a list view with new ones marked, and a detail page per enquiry. It offered "how they heard about us" as choices — WhatsApp, hoarding, a friend — and it chose to store the budget as a range (under ₹50,000, ₹50,000 to ₹1,00,000, above ₹1,00,000 a year) rather than an exact number, which was the right call and not something we specified.
The first attempt failed its own tests — the form's final step submitted twice under a specific sequence of back-and-forward navigation. It found that itself, fixed it, and tried again. Fixing its own mistake was free.
Then make it survive a real parent
If someone half-fills the form and closes it, they should be able to come back to it. Also the preferred batch timing should only show batches that exist for the class they picked — a 9th standard parent should not be offered the 11th standard evening batch.
Both of these are the sort of thing you only think of once you imagine a real person using it badly. Neither was in the original description and neither would have been caught by any check.
What we had to correct
Every guide on this site has this section. If it were empty, the guide would be a demo.
The exam choices didn't fit every student. We said "the exam they are preparing for" and the agent offered JEE and NEET, because those are the exams people write about. The first enquiry that didn't fit was a parent who wanted Boards preparation only — the form gave them no honest answer, so they picked JEE and typed "actually only boards" into the timing box. Fixed choices quietly exclude every answer you didn't think to list. We listed our real batches: JEE, NEET, Boards.
The unread marker was per-enquiry, not per-viewer. Fine for one person, wrong the moment the front-desk didi and the owner both opened it — reading an enquiry marked it read for everybody. We only noticed because we happened to open it on two phones.
This is the failure mode worth internalising: the agent builds what a single user needs unless you tell it there are several. It is not going to ask.
It emailed nobody. We assumed "I need to see which ones are new" implied being told — an email, a message, anything. It doesn't, and the agent read it literally and correctly. Two requests later we had an email on each new enquiry, but the assumption was ours.
File uploads didn't work the way we expected. We asked for "parents can attach the last report card" and got a file input that stored the file on the app's own disk. That works until the app restarts. We had to be explicit that uploads needed to survive the app restarting.
Where it stopped short
There's no way to reply to a parent from inside it — you still dial the number yourself. There's no search across enquiries, which starts mattering somewhere around thirty of them. And there's no way to record what happened next — visited, admitted, went to the institute across the road — which is what you'd actually want in the week admissions open.
We stopped because it was doing the job. That is usually the right place to stop.