👨‍💻 I rebuilt a gym sign up form three times before I asked the owner one question

Four months ago I built a sign up form for a small gym near my house. It was my first paid freelance job, 6,000 rupees, and I spent two weeks on it. Animations, a progress bar, fields that turned red while you typed. It worked on every phone I owned. The owner looked at it for about a minute. He said it was lovely, but why does it ask for date of birth and home address? All he needed was a name, a phone number and which batch, morning or evening. I had copied the fields from a big gym website because I thought that's what a gym form looks like. I never asked him what he does with the information. So I cut it down to three fields. Then he said people forget the batch timings, so I put the timings under the field. Then he said the front desk staff need to see new sign ups in the morning without logging in anywhere, so I made a plain page they can open on a phone. That third version took two days, not two weeks. What I got wrong wasn't really the code. I thought my job was just to build the thing. Half of it is sitting next to the person for fifteen minutes and watching how they work. Now before I open my editor I ask what happens before this screen, what happens after it, and who gets annoyed when it breaks. It has saved me a lot of rewriting, and he has given me two more small jobs since. Did anyone else build the wrong thing first on their early freelance work? What do you ask a client now before you start?

I wouldn't call those first two weeks a waste, even if the owner never cared about the animations. My first paid job was a menu page for a bakery in Mehdipatnam, and I overbuilt it the same way. Most of what I learned on it I used later, just not for the bakery. The plain page for the front desk is my favourite part of your story though. Nobody asks for that at the start, and it ends up being the thing they open every day.

Terminator3's fourth question is the one that bites me every time. Clients swear the form is final and then Ramzan timings arrive.

Copying the fields from a big gym website is such a familiar mistake. I did the same for a tuition centre in Tolichowki and asked parents for their office address. Not one of them filled it in, and the owner never once looked at that column.

Your three questions are good, but I would add a fourth: how often will this change? I once built a booking page for a coaching centre and skipped that one.