Six things we removed from the booking widget

The booking widget is the only part of Halfpast most people will ever see, and almost all of our work on it has been deletion.

Here is what came out, roughly in order of how much it mattered.

1. Account creation

The biggest one, by a distance. Requiring a password before someone can book a haircut loses a large share of first-time bookers. It is now off by default and opt-in, and the businesses that turn it on are almost all ones with memberships, where it is genuinely needed.

2. The address field

We collected it because some businesses do home visits. Most do not, and asking a client for their home address to come to your premises reads as slightly creepy. It is now a per-service option, off unless the service is mobile.

3. The confirmation step

We had a review screen: here is what you picked, press confirm. It felt responsible. It also lost people, because the summary was already visible the whole time they were choosing.

The fix was to make the summary live — it fills in as you go — and then have one button that does the thing. What you see above on the homepage is that design.

4. Time zone selection

For a business with one physical location, asking the client what time zone they are in is asking them to do arithmetic that we should be doing. Now we only ever ask when the appointment is genuinely remote.

5. “How did you hear about us?”

Businesses ask for this and we understand why, but it sits between the client and the thing they came to do, and the answers are unreliable anyway. It moved to the post-booking email, where the response rate is lower but the answers are better and it costs no bookings.

6. The captcha

Replaced with rate limiting and a honeypot field. Bot bookings were a real problem and the captcha did solve it — while also failing a meaningful number of real people, disproportionately the ones on older phones or using a screen reader.

What we added instead

Almost nothing. One thing: the deposit amount, shown before the card screen rather than on it. Telling somebody there is a £15 deposit at the point they pick a time, instead of at the point they get their wallet out, slightly reduces bookings started and clearly increases bookings finished.