The war of words with the 2000 US Presidential election in Florida highlights a significant and serious problem with forms, not just for the ballot but for all public-use and internal forms for many organisations. In this article I’d like to address some of the major issues that the ballot paper issue have highlighted. As an Australian, I’m not in a position to comment on US politics so I don’t even want that to be an issue in this discussion. Irrespective of any political content, it should be obvious to any professional forms person that there was indeed, a problem with the form. For those American readers who have strong political views on the issue, I just ask that you put those aside while reading this article and consider the form design aspects.

The poor design and resulting issues are typical of many forms. I’ve read comments that the person who designed the form was not a forms professional. That may be so, but design by a “professional forms person” is of itself no guarantee of success. I can tell you from years of experience that if you were to examine most public-use forms designed by forms specialists you’d still find a huge number of errors. The typical response to this is that it’s the form fillers who are to blame. There have been many comments on the ballot paper issue along these lines. Some have commented that it should have been obvious to voters that they just follow the arrow to the hole. Others have said that people who can’t read the form didn’t deserve to have their vote registered correctly. In other words, the form was well designed. It was just incompetent voters. But is that how we should approach our form design?

I put it to you that the purpose of a good form is to collect or provide accurate information. If the form doesn’t do that then it isn’t a good form. It isn’t fulfilling its purpose. To blame the form filler is a cop out for incompetent design and has no place in professional forms analysis work. We’ve proved over and over again that it IS POSSIBLE to eliminate most forms errors with a better approach to design. We’ll never have 100% success, but we CAN reduce the errors on most forms to a minimal amount. Now to be fair to my fellow analysts, much of the understanding of what people do with forms has come about in the past 20 years. Unfortunately much of the research and resultant knowledge has either not been made available or has been ignored. I’ve been talking about these issues for years, especially at the annual Symposiums of the Business Forms Management Association. But it amazes me how many people say that they like the ideas but couldn’t apply them in their organisations because “we don’t design forms that way”. Well, let’s hope the recent fiasco helps us all to reconsider.

Contrary to popular opinion (which is not substantiated by scientific studies), designing forms according to old fashioned “rules” of box layout, cryptic captions and minimising paper doesn’t lead to effective data collection. I’ve read some amazing statements from forms people about “zoning”, the need for heavy lines so show people where to go and a host of other “techniques”, yet when we look at forms being filled out in the real world we find that such approaches often hinder form filling rather than helping. Many people don’t like change, so I’m sure what I’m saying here will not be popular in some quarters. All I can say is, if you want to follow tradition, go ahead. But don’t complain when people don’t fill out your forms as they should. Forms analysts have to get past the old fashioned design ideas of the 1950′s and come into the 21^st Century. If we’re going to get forms to WORK then we need a better approach.

This isn’t the place to go into those issues in detail. I’ve done that in my book Forms For People. But I do want to go back to the ballot paper problem and look at four of the five issues that this form raises.

Here is a copy of the ballot paper.

Form filling habits

One of the major items to come from recent research is the knowledge that most people fill out forms habitually. Most of us tend to approach form filling based on the experience of filling out other forms. When faced with a new form most people jump straight in and make a lot of assumptions about what to do. I’ll expand on this in subsequent sections. So in our form design we have to take this into account. From extensive testing of public-use forms I can assure you that it is a MAJOR consideration in creating effective forms. I am a firm believer that the role of a forms analyst is to design a form that does what it’s supposed to do. A big part of that analytical process is to do all we can to help the form fillers. Complaining about their incompetence won’t change things. What we need to do is create forms that work in spite of incompetence. Some years ago we had the International Year of Literacy. During that year there were many articles written on functional illiteracy. My comment then was that it’s often the form designers who are functionally illiterate since they don’t design forms that fulfil their function. My view of this hasn’t changed.

In the case of the ballot paper, many people reported that they filled out the form according to past experience, reading down the list on the left and, if selecting the second name, punching the second hole. Why didn’t they see the arrow?  Read on!

Reading

Here is where many form designers make serious mistakes. PEOPLE DO NOT READ A FORM LIKE A BOOK. They don’t just read from left to right and top to bottom. People tend to look for where they THINK the first data item is and then backtrack to where the question/caption/instruction APPEARS to be. Too bad if they guessed wrong! Too bad if they didn’t read or even see all the instruction!  In the case of the ballot paper, it appears that past experience led many people to the names first, but then they went straight to the hole they thought they had to punch. The reason they didn’t see the arrow is explained below.

This issue highlights a problem that many designers aren’t aware of. A person’s field of focus is very narrow. Let me give you an example that you may be able to try for yourself. To do this you’ll need a coin such as an Australian 20 cent, American Quarter or Canadian Dollar. On the Australian and US coin, stare at the nose on the head and you won’t be able to read the coin’s year. On the Canadian coin, stare at the word “CANADA” and you can’t see the year–at least on the one I have in my possession. In other words just focusing on something as close as 1 cm (1/2 inch) away from the year means you can’t read the year.

We also know now that people rarely examine the whole form before filling it out. The point I’m making is that when people are reading a question or entering data they haven’t yet seen what follows. When they’ve finished they just go to where they believe the next entry/reading point is. In the case of the ballot paper, it appears that many people didn’t see the arrow. They went straight from the name to the hole.

It is for this reason that we usually design forms with text right aligned to the left of check boxes. The person reads the test and the box follows immediately after. Many people are afraid to use this approach because they think it is unconventional. But try it and you’ll find it often gets much better results.

Consistency

To make matters even more confusing, some people reported that they “knew” they were voting for the second name on the ballot paper and just went straight to the second hole as they had done in the past.

Consistency in design is an important issue. It is closely related to the reading and habit issues raised above.

Aged people

This is another of the areas where the ballot paper failed. Yet ironically, the person who designed it was reported to have said that it was changed from the previous approach to HELP aged people. Where did it go wrong?

Here are some of the key points that come from our research.

1.    Most aged people DO NOT progress through the form the same way younger people do. Our testing has shown that they skim the form looking for items they expect to find, often the items they think are most important. Often their poor eyesight plays an important part in this behaviour. They find it very tiring and time consuming to read everything.

2.    Aged people have a serious problem with short-term memory loss. Even if they had read the whole form, it is likely that many would not have remembered the location of all items.

3.    Aged people have had a whole lifetime of bad experiences in form filling. The habit problem mentioned earlier is worse with aged people, many of whom have NEVER had the experience of filling out an easy-to-use form. They just expect EVERY form to be bad.

4.    The bad experience mentioned above frequently leads to the idea that a form, by definition, must be hard to use. We found repeatedly that older people had an intense fear of forms. Many realised that their poor vision and memory problems made form filling a slow process and, for them, very unpleasant.

This leads to the old psychological problem of stress having a bearing on how the form is completed. It’s bad enough when people face real problems with their forms, but when they are fearful before they even see the form, the problems are greatly magnified. The fear and intimidating nature of many forms causes some aged form fillers to panic, become flustered and unable to think clearly about the answers.

These are only some of the issues that would have influenced the results with aged people filling out the ballot paper. For other types of forms there are even more issues that are discussed in Forms For People. I’ve heard numerous comments that if people were too old to fill out the forms properly then they shouldn’t have been voting. I choose to have the view that just because a person has a disability that hinders their form filling capacity they shouldn’t just be thrown on the scrap heap.

Testing

This is the final point I want to make and it is by far the most important matter.

In Australia businesses recently filled out what I believe is one of the most horrific forms I’ve ever come across–their quarterly Activity Statement (a type of tax return). I read a report in a printing journal that the people who produced it claimed that it had been “tested”. But what did they mean by “testing”? If it was tested and found to work, why has it been such a dismal failure? Why so many angry and confused business people? Why such fear that many small businesses are threatening to close down because they can’t cope with the paperwork? We could ask similar questions about the ballot paper issue.

There have been two very common approaches to testing that modern scientific research has shown to be useless for producing effective forms. Often these approaches are referred to as “market testing”, applying market research principles. Consistently, research has shown that testing the potential market of a product is a very different issue to testing the useability of a form.

The first approach is to conduct an opinion survey, maybe asking people if they like the way the form has been laid out–or worse, asking people their opinions on whether or not the form will work. The research has shown that this approach just doesn’t produce facts. All the tester gets is a warm fuzzy feeling that people like the design.

The second is to get a group of people–often very large–to fill out the form and then examine the completed forms to see what was entered. Again, research has shown that there is little value in this. It certainly will show numerous areas where people went wrong and may give you some useful statistics, but it doesn’t show WHY the errors occurred or tell you much about the problems people had.

I have consistently advised form designers to use observational useability studies where you watch the person filling out the form. There will be some forms where this approach isn’t feasible and you will have to use some other methodology, but for most forms, this provides the most detailed information on how the form is functioning. I am confidant that a simple observational study, with perhaps as few as 10 people, would have revealed the problems with the ballot paper. The process is so simple yet I find that many form designers are unwilling to use it because it’s not the way they normally go about things. In other words, it isn’t tradition–or maybe it’s just fear of the unknown and untried.

However, I must point out that while it is a simple process, it must be done the right way. It isn’t just a matter of watching. There is a right way to go about it that I’ve covered in depth elsewhere. I strongly recommend that you read the relevant chapters in Forms For People. You may also find some useful information on a paper on our web site called “How would you know if your forms were failing?”

Conclusion

Modern research is showing that between 80% and 100% of people filling out public-use forms make mistakes. Yet there is no need for the error rate to be anywhere near this. I wouldn’t be happy till this figure went down to as low as 5%. Good forms can be produced. Of course, this generally requires professional forms analysts, but even they need to keep up to date with the latest knowledge on their profession. Don’t just rely on outdated advice from 50 years ago. We’ve learned a great deal about human form-filling behaviour in the last 20 years, so let’s make use of it and make everyone’s form-filling experience so much sweeter.

 © 2000 Robert Barnett 

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E-MAIL: rob@RBAinformationdesign.com.au