Are your forms trapped in the cobwebs of antiquity? 

In 1454 Hans Gensfleisch (alias Johann Gutenberg) printed a form for the granting of indulgences that was designed around the limitations of the letterpress printing of his day. As printing technology improved, forms became more common, but still the limitations of letterpress drove the designs. Unfortunately for the modern forms user, many designers still use these old fashioned ideas as if they are good form design practice when they should have been trapped in the cobwebs of antiquity.

Below are two classic examples of these ancient practices. 

1.  Incomplete boxes

There were usually no ruled lines on the sides of boxes and tables because letterpress rules didn’t join at the corners and this made the form look untidy as shown in figure 1.

Figure 1 • a typical letterpress form

I have a textbook on form design that says you should STILL follow the practice of leaving lines off the end of the boxes. Even the US Visa Waiver form follows this practice causing extreme frustration for incoming passengers. I had a flight steward tell me that every plane carries 200 extra cards for the people who make mistakes and they all get used—all this because the lack of clearly defined boxes causes confusion.

2.  Computer input forms

By 1951 the U.S. Bureau of the Census had installed its first electronic data processing system, and the computer age had arrived. When I started work at AWA in 1958, they had just installed one of world’s first commercial computers—the Leo II. It was a huge machine that didn’t do much by today’s standards, but its successors were to have a profound impact on the processing of accounts and high volume data.

Figure 2  •  Leo II Computer at W.D. & H.O. Wills, Bristol

Photo courtesy LEO Computers Society

In the early days, data was entered by punching holes in cards with a different hole arrangement for each character. The most common card had 12 rows for the hole combinations and 80 columns for data. Each data character needed to be entered into a specific column, so forms for data entry were designed with a separate box for each character.

Eventually, data input progressed from punched cards to paper tape and finally to disk, but the computer world still floods business forms with character separators that, with the exception of some optically read forms, have limited practical application. To make matters worse, research into form-filling practices has shown that character separators—either separate character boxes or small tick marks (or tramlines) along the bottom of the data fields slows down reading and hinders legibility.

The need for ‘best practice’ form design

Today, many forms practitioners parrot these ‘rules’ as if they still provide for good design, giving no thought to their origins or their applicability.

Other designers think that all you have to do is make the forms look ‘good’ and follow so-called rules of ‘plain English’. But the astounding evidence from modern forms research is that this just doesn’t work, with many Australian government forms costing hundreds of thousands of dollars per year just to repair the errors people make.

If you had to create a form, where would you start? Do you know what would be ‘best practice’? Do you know why so many people make mistakes filling in government forms?

I put it to you that there is no excuse for bad forms. There will always be some errors, but having forms with 80% containing errors is inexcusable given the knowledge we have today from scientific research into the way people use forms.

There are answers to bad forms. If you’d like to know more we have a comprehensive 500 page textbook, Forms For People: designing forms that people can use. 

MAIL: PO Box 95, Belconnen ACT 2616, Australia
PHONE: (02) 6241 9022 or (INTERNATIONAL) + 61 2 6241 9022
FAX: (02) 6241 9023 or (INTERNATIONAL) + 61 2 6241 9023
E-MAIL: rob@RBAinformationdesign.com.au