Intake Form Design: Collect Requests Ready to Act On

An intake form collects requests in a consistent shape. IT teams use it for access and equipment, marketing for content requests, finance for purchase approvals and operations for almost everything. Its worth is measured by how often a request can be acted on without a follow-up question.

Start from the follow-up questions

List the questions you most often ask after receiving a request. Those are the form's fields. If you always ask which system, how urgent and who is affected, then those are fields. If you never use an answer, delete the field.

Write clear questions

• Use plain words that the requester would use.
• Ask one thing per field.
• Give examples for free-text fields.
• Prefer choices to free text where the answers are known, because they route and report cleanly.
• Mark a field required only if you cannot act without it.

Use conditional fields

Show a question only when it applies. A field about hardware appears only when the requester chooses hardware. Atlas supports conditional fields, where a field appears only when another field has a chosen value, and a hidden field is never required. This keeps the form short for each person while collecting what is needed from each.

Decide what a submission becomes

A submission should become a unit of work with an owner. In Atlas, each submission to a form creates a task in the destination project, with the field you nominate as the title and the other answers in the description. Required fields are enforced before the task is created, so an incomplete submission is refused rather than creating a task with a gap in it. The form has a public address that anyone with the link can open without an Atlas account.

Approvals

Some requests need a decision before work starts. Atlas tasks created by a form can carry an approval state of pending, approved or rejected, decided by a member other than the one who requested the approval, and a task with no pending request cannot be decided. Use it for spend or access requests.

Close the loop

• Tell requesters what happens next and when, on the confirmation message.
• Download submissions as CSV to review volume and common categories.
• Switch a form off when it is retired. In Atlas, disabling a form makes its public address return not found while every earlier submission stays where it is.
• Review the form each quarter. Remove fields nobody uses and add the ones you keep asking for.