Much organisational ‘knowledge’ originates with forms and forms data often comes from form-filler’s ‘knowledge’.
Bad design blocks ‘knowledge’ extraction. If a form’s data doesn’t INFORM, it isn’t ‘information’, just misinformation and misinformation means poor corporate ‘knowledge’. Read the rest of this entry »
After forty plus years in the business I’m still amazed at how many IT people think forms and procedures are unimportant.
Go to a meeting and talk to analysts and as soon as the subject comes up their eyes glaze over as if it is too childish to discuss. When we tell them we design forms and write procedures they generally aren’t the slightest bit interested.
Sometimes I come across someone who understands as I did recently at a meeting at IBM, but that is rare indeed.
Yet how many systems have you come across that don’t do what they are supposed to do because the data collection part of the system doesn’t work properly. Most systems start and often finish with forms. They often need forms during the process as well. The trouble is that IT people tend to think that because it is on a computer screen, the form is no longer a form. Yet the same general principles apply as for paper forms. Even worse are the forms often created by web designers who think that they are different again. There are some technical differences due to the way people use the screens over paper entry, but these are only minor compared to issues such as getting the language and data entry sequence right.
I often tell such people that if they don’t think forms analysis is a big subject then why does it take a 500 page text book to tell people how to do it?
You’d think that after nearly 50 years of business computing and having systems fail over and over again, that they’d learn some lessons.
When will they ever learn that if they want their computer system to work properly for the end users, then they should get the forms and procedures right FIRST—before they start writing code.
When will they ever learn that forms analysis and procedures analysis are specialised professions? After writing the above I received a copy of the book “Failure To Learn” by Prof. Anthony Hopkins of the Australian National University. The book deals with the BP Texas City Refinery disaster in 2005. It follows on from an earlier book “Lessons from Longford” which dealt with a similar disaster at the Exxon Gas Plant in Melbourne Australia in 1998. BP had known all about the Exxon disaster but failed to learn the lesson.
When I read the Longford book, I was struck by the relevance of the issues raised by Anthony Hopkins to management in general and to forms management in particular. The result was a class delivered at the Business Forms Symposium in Phoenix in 2006. The associated paper is available for download from our web site.
As I thought about the issues further, It became startlingly evident to me that it wasn’t only forms management that was relevant to forms professionals, but also form design. Why are so many form designers around the world still designing forms as if they live in the 1950′s. I and others have written and lectured numerous times about how the old fashioned ideas of the mid 20th Century just don’t work for public-use forms. Yet designers fail to learn the lessons. They continue with old ideas such as tiny boxes with “upper left corner captions” instead of questionnaires, no lines on the ends of boxes, cryptic box labels instead of plain language, “tramline” delimiters for data entry fields, etc.
The problem is heightened in the USA with antiquated legislation such as the Paperwork Reduction Act which only exacerbates the problem by reducing the amount of paper but increasing the work. Administrators wonder why so many people have trouble filling out the forms. Organizations complain about the amount of time it takes to deal with the errors people make and provide expensive help desks for form fillers. Yet with modern approaches they could reduce all this to minimal amounts.
For example, between 80% and 100% of public-use forms typically have one or more errors in the data collected, yet with best practice design this can be dramatically reduced to as low as 5%. I know of one case in Australia where it was costing $10 million per year just to correct the errors form fillers make—and that’s with a country of only around 20 million people. What is the cost in places such as the USA or India with a much larger population?
So while I was castigating the IT profession for failure to learn, forms designers and forms analysts need to learn some lessons as well.
Designing a public-use form involves a lot more analysis than what you would often need for an internal form. In examining communication issues, you need to place emphasis on all the individuals involved. To produce the ideal form, you have to attempt to place yourself in the position of the various people involved.
That’s a pretty tall order for even the most experienced analyst and, frankly, could be considered impossible. A British government report1 stated that:
“ … the most common cause of bad forms is that no one [in government] looks at them from the point of view of the recipient or thinks what will happen if they are misunderstood.”
David Sless2 commented on this in his 1987 Presidential Address to the Australian Communication Association.
“ … our research shows over and over again that administrators fail to put themselves in the position of the people who have to use the forms. However, identifying the reason does not automatically lead to a solution, since it is by no means obvious how you do put yourself in somebody else’s position.”
As you progress in your analysis of a form, you should be continually improving your understanding of the users and the way they fill out and process it. You will never reach a perfect understanding since each person is unique, but you can certainly develop a general understanding of each broad category of users. The better your understanding becomes then the better will be the quality of the end product.
It’s for this reason that I strongly recommend that forms analysts/designers be the ones to carry out useability testing rather than sending the forms to a separate testing laboratory. If you are a form designer, you will learn far more about good form design and human form-filling behaviour from your own testing than from books.
Recently, our company had the opportunity to develop forms for a number of groups of people that we don’t normally come into contact with as far as work is concerned—farmers, managers working under extreme pressure situations, aged veterans and chronically ill aged patients. In the process, we have developed much greater empathy for the special form-filling needs of these groups.
Empathy has been defined as ‘putting yourself in the shoes of the users’, but this is one of the most difficult tasks of the forms analyst—and a task that may never be totally successful. But with a sound theoretical base and experience in designing public-use forms, it is possible to progressively improve in this area and improve the confidence level of your results. For example, I believe that from our recent experience we are far better equipped to design forms for aged people than ever before and a lot of that knowledge is included in our textbook, Forms For People. In time you will build up sufficient empathy for each type of user and you will be able to document the details for future reference.
Here are four of the characteristics of form fillers that you will need to consider.
Subject knowledge: this particularly applies to forms governed by special legislation, but it can apply to any form. For example, an insurance application form that asks for personal health details should not use medical jargon if it’s to be filled out by the general public. Another typical problem form can be a tax return that requires expert knowledge of tax law.
Language and numeracy skills: e.g. do they need a special understanding of terms used in the form? Kilpatrick and Millar3 reported that:
“Australians live and work in a highly literate society. Dispersed throughout this society, however, are large numbers of people whose literacy and numeracy skills are insufficient for modern living and working, and among these is a group whose literacy and numeracy skills are poor. While some of this group are in work, their foothold in it is precarious. The changing nature of work makes their lack of literacy skills an increasing liability. People with poor literacy and numeracy skills are found in every equity group, and many fall into a number of groups of disadvantage.”
Knowledge of your organization: In extensive forms testing that we carried out for a large national corporation, one of the most significant findings was that many customers didn’t recognise the company’s own product names that often occurred on their forms. Yet an understanding of these names was critical to the customers’ use of the form. The company had just assumed that their customers knew the product names.
Their form-filling experience — e.g. are they young people just leaving school with little or no experience, or are they aged people with a whole lifetime of filling out bad forms
Design of public-use forms is not a simple process. If you want to minimise the amount of re-work due to errors and the high cost of telephone support, using appropriate language with empathy for the users is an important first step.
________________________
1 Grant M., Exley M., Lonsdale T., Goddard I. (1982). Forms Under Control. London: Management & Personnel Office.
2 Sless David (1987). A Matter of Position. Presidential Address to the Australian Communication Association.
3 Kilpatrick, Sue & Millar Pat (2004). People with poor language, literacy and numeracy skills. A hidden equity group? The National Centre for Vocational Education Research.
This article is taken from Chapter 3 of Forms For People.
Contact Robert Barnett and Associates Pty Ltd at:
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
In this paper I’d like to deal with one of the much heralded buzz words of the late 20th Century—Quality Assurance—a faddish term often used to convince an unwary buyer into thinking that a product is better than it really is.
Quality is important and I’m not against a sound quality assurance program, but too many people use the term without understanding what it means. For example, many government buyers use quality assurance procedures as pretence for not wasting public money. It sounds good to say that the supplier of forms and other goods and services is an accredited quality assured organisation, but before we start talking about forms quality we need to understand what quality really is. The meaning depends on both context and whether we are referring to quality being a noun or adjective. When used in connection with quality assurance it refers to excellence or superiority—but excellence in what? Many people in the forms industry look on quality solely in terms of printing and production. True quality has to be considered from the user’s viewpoint; it doesn’t matter how well a form is printed if people can’t use it.
Quality is often seen as conformity to rules and accepted practice, but does this measure successful performance and understanding?
Does the use of ‘plain language’, traditional typographic principles and appropriate rules of layout mean that a document will work? Are the traditional methods of document testing and evaluation really successful, or do we just blindly follow them and hope that nobody asks too many probing questions?
Many researchers and document designers have a strong attachment to the traditional methods. Yet the empirical evidence shows that these methods are usually inappropriate and based on a primitive understanding of the realities of human communication.
‘Plain language’ and good layout may lay a foundation for a document to succeed, but these characteristics alone are not sufficient to guarantee that a document will work. Modern research is showing that most forms, even those evaluated ‘according to the book’ as good quality, are abject failures. They may look good, they may follow all the ‘rules’, but they don’t carry out the task for which they were designed.
Many people use preference studies as a means of assessing quality to determine whether a new form will be satisfactory, but these don’t tell us whether or not the form works. A well-publicised US study of telephone bills showed that it didn’t matter what people thought of the various proposed designs, they were all effectively as bad as one another. A government official told me that market research had shown that a commonly used major public-use form was a great success. Yet most people I knew who had used the form invariably told me about the problems they’d had and how they didn’t understand it. I realise some will dismiss this anecdotal report as unscientific, but there is often a vast discrepancy between what the market researchers claim and what people say really happens.
Some years ago we were commissioned by a major public company to conduct useability studies of one of their most commonly used forms. The form had already undergone extensive analysis by a market research company using focus groups, yet we found in our useability testing with many respondents that the market research results were significantly flawed. They had been asking people about preference whereas we were researching actual use by real customers.
Many printers confuse design and construction features with quality. They push the latest fads—multicoloured backgrounds, graduated shading, round-cornered boxes and such like—but while these may contribute to quality in some circumstances, they are only a minor component, although hopefully making the form easier to use. Prettiness doesn’t equal quality!
Examine the forms that receive awards in international competitions and you will see an array of exotic features, but not one mention of whether or not the users of the forms understand what the questions mean.
The fastest processing in the world is meaningless if the data is fiction. I’m not knocking modern technology. I use it myself almost every day and most of the forms I design today are electronic. Even the paper forms are designed using a computer. But we are going way beyond the use of technology to improve the documents, making use of scientific testing procedures to ensure that the captured data is as accurate as we can make it.
Good printing is important and bad printing can certainly inhibit quality performance, but this is only a small part of the story.
I am reminded of an Australian forms contest a few years ago. Most judges were raving about the magnificence of the cheque entries. In most cases the printing was superb and the four-colour pictures were very attractive. One cheque, highly praised by my fellow judges, had a multi-coloured bowl of fruit as the background, but no one thought to ask about whether or not it was useable as a cheque. The text on the form was printed in a pastel yellow-green ink that was barely visible and even the written entries would have been hard to read.
Management makes many decisions based on the data that comes from forms. Management time is costly and forms should be designed to reduce labour content as much as possible. Yet forms cost far more than most people realise. Managers frequently see only the printing cost and because they haven’t been trained in the value of good form design and the cost effectiveness of sound forms management, they just don’t understand the real issues.
This article is taken from Chapter 2 of Forms For People.
© 2008 Robert Barnett
The importance of good design has been known for many years. Charles O. Libby, writing in the May 1953 edition of The Office, had this to say:
“The forms analyst who writes on form design often assumes a wisdom which could hardly exist. In many articles our hero appears to know all about any form, its why—what—when—where—how—and—who, its life cycle and utility, its need and requirements, its background and all its relationships. It might appear to the uninitiated that all the busy executive has to do is turn his ideas over to this bright young man and all would be well. I am afraid that all would not be well. One man alone is only one man.”
Libby explained how that after he had spent years in forms design, one of the analysts he had trained had improved the design and method of one of his own forms without changing the data and purpose.
“This episode taught me two things: First, that one has to work continuously in forms design to be alert to all possibilities; and second, that the person who has in mind the objective of the form and the person who works out the mechanics and method, approach the problem from two different points of view. A good form is the product of at least two minds. The forms analyst must have the know-how, but he must also have the know-how-much. He makes progress by borrowing thoughts from others, applying them to his own purposes, and lending them to others in the relay race of progress. He cannot know all. His work is largely collaboration. He furnishes the techniques and methods, his client furnishes the objectives and purposes—each has a contribution to make. It is the meeting of minds that is forms coordination.”
Much has been learned about this “team process” since Charles Libby wrote. This “meeting of minds” is not only difficult (and often not totally possible), but it involves much more than just the two people that Libby talked about. It doesn’t take a study of a thousand form fillers, or necessarily even a hundred. But it does require the input of typical users and a sound testing and evaluation process.
It’s important to involve both the sponsors (the ‘owners’ of the form) and the various users from the beginning to make effective design and implementation much easier. But don’t try to deceive them. They generally know far more about the actual operation of the form than the designers, so their involvement is a real asset, not just a show. A 1980 study of US tax forms had this to say about the holistic approach to form design.
“The project team began by reviewing past research undertaken by the IRS that related to the tax forms. The team also assessed recommendations which had been made by independent groups such as the American Bar Association (ABA) and the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA). This helped us to identify major problems and opportunities for this project. We reviewed over 45 documents in the Service’s files dating back to 1966. Apart from tax legislation, which was outside the scope of this project, these documents focused on one or more of these five major issues:
These documents formed a useful body of research. They led us to several major conclusions, the most significant of which was that computation, graphics, instructions, and language are interconnected in the tax forms and instructions; therefore, we needed to use a holistic approach accommodating all these factors in order to achieve major simplification.”
One of the best recent examples of this team approach has been the work undertaken in Australia at Centrelink as part of a project to review all public-use “social-security-type forms and make them easier for the public to understand. The project has certainly had its difficulties but the team approach has been a major factor in its success so far. From the outset, teams of people responsible for policy and content have worked hand in hand with IT people and a team of forms professionals who are experienced in analysis, design and useability testing. The approach was strongly supported by management all the way up to the Minister for Human Services. There’s still a long way to go, but I’ve been very impressed with the results so far and the management and staff at Centrelink are to be congratulated for their efforts.
But I stress that it could never have been done without the team approach to design. Most important was the clear distinction between the content aspects handled by administrative staff and the design aspects handled by the forms professionals. Staff knew what was needed from a legislative and policy perspective and the questions they needed to ask, but it was the forms professionals who were able to bring their skills to bear in improving the layout of forms and applying best practice to question structure and language.
This article is based on material from Chapter 6 of Forms For People.
© 2007 Robert Barnett
We have a separate publication listing books and articles on forms and related subjects.
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.
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.
This paper is based on an article that was written for Modern Office in 1981.
Dear Employer,
When your employees use your forms what goes through their minds?
• Do they think you’re a good organisation to work for or do your forms give the impression that your organisation is a ‘backyard joint’? • Do they see you as a professional manager? • Do they become hostile towards your business? • Do the forms give the impression that you respect the staff? • Do they desire to work harder, or do the forms give them the impresson that they are unimportant? • Do they understand what they have to do with the forms?
“Now what”, you may say, “has all this to do with forms? Surely forms are only cheap bits of paper with blank spaces for people to fill in information? That’s just the point! If you regard them as ‘cheap bits of paper’, then that’s the way your employees will treat them…CHEAPLY!
Many organisations spend a lot of money getting public-use forms designed by graphic designers so that they can impress their customers. In some cases they may even have them designed by professional forms analysts. But what about internal forms? Why are they so frequently ignored? In 1930 United States statistics showed that for every person working in a clerical job there were thirty plant or production workers. By 1950 this had increased to one clerk for every 2.5 production workers. In Australia in 1981 the ratio was one clerk to every 2.05 trades/production workers. By 2002 the ratio was one clerk to every 1.02 trades/production workers. That’s approximately 50% of the workforce doing primarily clerical work—and their major tools of trade are the forms you give them.
What would happen if you gave your carpenters saws with teeth missing, or your electricians drills with worn-out motors, or your desktop publishing staff computer mice with buttons that don’t work, or your accountants calculators that give wrong answers? The answer should be obvious: TROUBLE—DISCONTENT—MAYBE EVEN STRIKES.
We don’t expect our tradespeople to work without proper tools so why treat our clerks differently? We spend large sums on computers to supposedly improve productivity yet completely negate the benefits in many cases by feeding these great machines with garbage from our incompetent, unprofessional and often ‘antique’ forms. A few years back I came across a company inputing data to its computer system with forms that were designed for an out-of-date manual system and they were wondering why there was a rejection rate of 25%. The data entry operators were querying one in four input forms. You can image what affect this was having on the relationships between the data entry operators and those responsible for the content.
The first thing that strikes many form users is appearance. That initial mental impression will have a big impact on what they do with it. A pleasant looking, professional form gives a feeling of importance. I’ve come across many managers who’ve said, “it’s only internal”, as if their employees don’t really matter, and then wonder why some employees copy the same attitude—“it’s ONLY internal”—as if the work itself didn’t really matter. Treat your employees like dirt and they’ll often treat your business the same way. We use fancy letterheads and large organisations might even spend a million dollars or more for a graphics expert to design logos and corporate image, and then balk at spending a few dollars on forms.
Some years back, I conducted a form design course for a leading financial institution and my initial reaction on entering their building was one of respect. The foyer was beautifully furnished with a magnificent gold emblem over the entrance. The office area was tastefully decorated with pot plants, original oil paintings on the walls, solid teak desks, other attractive furniture and highly polished metal fittings. They gave the impression of a solid, financially stable and very dignified institution. Then I had a look at their forms. All I could say was “yuk”! The forms were photocopies of photocopies (of photocopies, etc.) of forms originally prepared on a typewriter. Now to give them credit, they were doing something about it and they did have what they considered genuine reasons for their approach. But while they had surrounded their employees with the trappings of wealth and importance, these same employees spent much of their working day, not looking at the paintings and pot plants, but at the forms. One was laughing at the other.
The second major problem is usually the design of the content. This is where user frustration sets in. Designers leave insufficient space for some items and too much for others. They use words in questions, captions and instructions that form fillers don’t understand. Management complains that people don’t fill in the forms properly, yet the forms aren’t laid out in a way that makes it clear what users have to do. I see many forms where the type is too small or difficult to read, and in many cases cluttered with unnecessary printing. Far too often, the forms ask for too much information—information that employees know is never used.
The moral of this sad tale of woe is that form design should not be left to amateurs. Although a person can learn the basics of form design in a year or two, I found from many years experience that it takes at least five years to thoroughly train a good all-round forms analyst. It’s a specialised field and organisations need specialist help. It’s common practice for organisations to outsource their form design work to a printing company, graphic design firm or perhaps an advertising agency or public relations company. However, just because someone knows how to print forms, create advertising or design graphics, it doesn’t follow that they understand forms, which are an entirely different subject. Form design falls into a specialised component of what is often referred to as ‘Information Design’. Equally dangerous areas to leave your form design to are the computer department or those responsible for web development. Given the extensive use of the Internet and the increasing use of electronic forms for both internal and public use, there is a big tendency for these areas to take over the form design function. My experience has been that the programmer or web developer who knows how to design effective forms is very rare indeed. In most organisations, such people just don’t exist. The IT and web people may need to be involved as part of the team, but rarely as the forms designers.
Finally, let me offer you a challenge. Find out who designs your forms and how much experience they’ve had. Then take a walk around your office and collect as many forms as you can. See how you go filling some of them in—or even better, conduct an error analysis. Since this paper was originally written for Modern Office, we’ve learned a great deal about how people use forms. Extensive research over the past 20 years has shown that between 80% and 100% of most public-use forms contain errors in the data, generally because of poor form design. An error analysis is a means of examining filled out forms to see where the errors are. If you’ve never done such a study, you’ll probably be in for a big shock.
Additional reading
© 2005 Robert Barnett
Some of the most common questions we’ve faced over the years have been concerned with the use of signatures on forms, both paper and electronic. These questions include the following:
Electronic digital signatures are different and I’ll discuss them separately.
As a general rule, a signature is intended to imply that the person signing takes responsibility for all the data entered BEFORE (or above) the signature. However, in practice there are two common problems:
I’ve often asked our clients how they make use of signatures from a legal perspective. It has been very rare to find an organization that goes to the trouble to scientifically check the authenticity of a signature. Even in the organizations that do check them, it is only in VERY rare and exceptional circumstances, usually when the validity of a signature is an issue in court.
Let me give you some real life scenarios:
So what does this mean—does it mean that signatures are useless or that we shouldn’t use them? Certainly not! Signatures are valuable for a variety of reasons including the following:
In summary, while a signature does have some value, it is still easy for data to be altered by someone, after the form is signed. Also, it rarely, of itself, identifies the signer or gives a guarantee of who signed the form. Some of the issues can be solved by the use of electronic signatures, but there is still usually no guarantee of the identity of the signer.
Some years ago we had the opportunity to conduct an extensive research project into signature space. We were able to measure 2000 signatures on a public use form and to collect relevant demographic data such as age, gender, ethnic origin, etc.
This resulted in a significant review of our approach to signature space design.
The most significant finding was that where the signature is to be inside a box, most people do not write within the space provided, but start writing ON the base line of the box. Some write the whole signature on the line while many write at an angle. This is important if you are scanning the forms for electronic imaging with a view to being able to read the signatures on screen at a later date. Modern scanning and computer technology is making this approach much more feasible for such matters as insurance claimant identification. It is for this reason that our preferred method (shown in figure 2) places a dotted line in the box. When this is done, people tend to write on the dotted line. You could also use a very pale screened line if it is to drop out in scanning.
We recommend that, wherever practicable, signature boxes be at least 60 mm (2 1/3”) wide x 22-25 mm (7/8”–1”) high with a fine writing line 15 mm (5/8”) from the top of the box. An even wider box would be preferable.
You should bear in mind that no matter how you draw your box, there will always be the person who, for personal or other reasons, chooses to write larger than the space provided. The people with the greatest difficulty are often aged people whose hand writing is shaky and who can’t see clearly. We’ve also found that some people will deliberately write outside the box boundary just because they object to being constrained, but there’s little you can do about these people.
Figure 1 simulates six typical signatures using the box size on the form we studied. Most users started writing on the bottom of the box so this didn’t allow for character descenders to be inside the box.
Figure 1
Figure 2 shows the ideal solution, but this is obviously too large for some forms. All I can do is show you what works effectively. You’ll have to adjust the dimensions to suit your needs.
Figure 2
It is also common practice to also require the date of signing and the printed name of the signatory. In some cases the form would also have the person’s position in the organisation.
How you solve the problem will depend on the design of the form. In Australia, many public use forms are questionnaires with sequentially numbered questions. We’ve found this to be generally the best approach and a great asset in reducing user errors. If you design forms this way, then you can easily solve the problem by giving the signature (or declaration) its own question number. This way it is obvious to the form filler that the signature needs to be entered. We do extensive testing of our forms and this approach has had 100% success.
I need to add at this point that although the use of questionnaires is very successful in reducing data entry error, there are principles that need to be followed for them to work successfully. For more information see my book Forms For People, chapters 4 and 23. You might also find the following papers on our web site of help:
How would you know if your forms were failing?
Reengineering business forms.
Note that this is not talking about digitised scans of handwritten signatures. I’m referring to a piece of electronic data that is unique to the signer. I don’t intend to provide a detailed technical explanation here. There are plenty of sources of such information on the Internet and in other publications.
But in summary, a digital signature is much like what is stored on a credit card. You place the credit card in the slot, enter your PIN, the machine reads the card and identifies you. In an electronic form, the process is similar. You click in the signature field and it activates the built-in signature software. This will need at least two items of data, the actual digital signature and a PIN to unlock it. There are many ways in which this can be carried out. You could, for example, have your signature on a floppy disk or swipe card that only you have. You could also store the signature on your computer but this means that anyone who has your PIN can use it.
Another method of signing is that used by Shana in their Informed software. While Informed allows access to normal digital signature services, it also allows the user to sign a form by logging on to their email system. They enter their user name and password, the form logs on to the email system and verifies the identity of the person, and then logs off and places the name of the person and date signed on the form. In this case, the insertion of the signature locks any fields predefined by the forms analyst so that they cannot be overwritten without deleting the signature first.
Note that, as with all digital signatures, this only guarantees the identity of the signer IF the signer’s PIN or password is secure. If other people have access to it, then it doesn’t provide that information.
Its value is that it allows the recipient to verify the signature and ensure that none of the signed fields on the form have been altered since it was signed. If anything has changed, verification returns an error. In addition, the form template itself can be signed independently of the data to allow the recipient to check the validity of the form and that it hasn’t been altered by anyone wince it was designed.
The way in which digital signatures are implemented varies from program to program but irrespective of the method, they do provide much greater security than is provided with handwritten signatures. The main value is in detecting fraud rather than identifying the signer, although the latter is possible if there is sufficient signing security.
Note that I’ve been talking about electronic signatures, not encryption. The latter is a process whereby the data in a document can be hidden to anyone after encryption that doesn’t have the relevant key to decrypt the document. For example, we recently assisted with a trial for a government department that allowed users to submit a highly confidential document over the Internet. The encryption required 2 keys, one to lock the document and a different key to unlock it. The form was filled out using Informed, and when the data was emailed, an encryption program detected the outgoing data and encrypted it with the Department’s Public Key (available to everyone). Once encrypted, it could only be unlocked with the Department’s Private Key (only available to selected departmental people), thereby preventing the data from being read by anyone who did not have access to the Private Key.
Hand-written signatures have some value as long as you realise their limitations.
Electronic signatures have greater security, but they generally can’t GUARANTEE the identity of the signer.
© 2002 Robert Barnett
On numerous occasions over the past few years our company has needed to phone organisations to find out whom we should talk to about forms. Many times, when asking to speak to the person responsible for forms, the reply has been along the lines: “we don’t use forms in our company!”. In one Australian study some years ago, most of the top 100 companies in the country were approached with a similar question and in over 90% of cases the receptionist either gave a similar answer to the above or didn’t know who was responsible.
What is the cause of this strange state of affairs? Do these people really believe that they don’t use forms? What does the answer mean anyway?
Ever since printed forms were introduced to the Western world by Gutenberg in 1454, they’ve been regarded as simple documents that virtually anyone can produce, and that idea hasn’t changed, so it’s no wonder that we get the responses we do. People, from management to the newest operative, just don’t take forms seriously. Every forms analyst can tell you about the strange responses they get when asked what sort of work they do. Tell people you “design forms” and you normally get a puzzled look and a question like, “you mean to say someone actually DESIGNS forms?”. I’ve often said that because we learn drawing in kindergarten, and since people consider forms to be just drawing lines, boxes and words, then form design is considered to be kid stuff. It isn’t!
Because we treat forms so lightly, business and government is faced with enormous problems that remain untouched. Repeated studies have shown that between 80% and 100% of filled out forms have one or more errors. The cost of correcting those errors is astronomical. In one study in Australia, we found close to 100% of a government application form wrongly filled out and needing to be returned to applicants. There were over 500,000 applications each year. Even using conservative estimates to correct the errors and process the paperwork as well as basing costs on wages only (without all the normal add-ons), we estimated that it was costing this department over 2 million dollars per year just to correct errors on that one form. Remember that this is not just an isolated case. It occurs in most organisations and with the vast majority of forms. Consider large government departments and organisations such as banks with thousands of forms—the cost becomes almost too large to imagine.
This sad state of affairs means that in most organisations, NO ONE is responsible for even basic form design, let alone responsibility for content and language. In many organisations every employee becomes an amateur ‘form designer’. Even worse, forms are often left in the hands of people who are often highly skilled in their particular field, but have little or no training in human communication. Typical of these groups of people are graphic designers, advertising agencies, computer programmers and printing companies. Many of these people are extremely competent in their relevant professions, but graphic design, advertising, IT and printing skills are not necessarily compatible with human communication skills. Human communication should be taught in universities and colleges to all these people, but unfortunately, what is often taught is nothing more than subjective opinions instead of knowledge based on research and empirical evidence.
It seems that as long as the form looks ‘pretty’ or follows arbitrary ‘rules’ of ‘plain language’ or ‘graphic design’, the owners of the forms are happy with the result. Then we end up blaming the form fillers for errors and claiming that they are functionally illiterate. I’ve said many times that it isn’t the users who are functionally illiterate, but the form designers who don’t know how to design forms to fulfil their function.
Management worries about the cost of printing and distributing forms and this is often the prime motivator for doing something about them. But this is only a tiny proportion of the total cost. My experience in testing forms over the past 15 years has been that the greatest cost is actually that of dealing with the errors people make. This often goes way beyond just the routine processing cost.
Right now we’re seeing an increasing interest in electronic forms with many organisations wanting to place all their forms on the Internet or intranet to eliminate printing, storage and similar costs. Trying to reduce costs is certainly praiseworthy, but I wonder what managers would say if they knew where the REAL cost savings lie. I’ll have more to say about this in a future Forms Perspective, but for now I’ll just comment that putting bad forms on the Internet is not the solution to improving productivity and reducing errors. Management must wake up to where the greatest cost savings lie and not just rely on technology. Part of that is to keep forms in the hands of forms specialists. The Internet is another of the real problems facing organisations where many people with web experience think they know all about communicating. One only has to look at the vast majority of web site that take ages to navigate (or even find relevant information) to realise how few web page designers really understand human communication.
The first step is to employ people who know about human communication as well as forms analysis and design. There’s a great move all around the world right now for outsourcing the forms function, but I still believe that it should be in-house in most organisations, especially the large ones. This may sound strange coming from a consultant who earns his living from other people’s forms problems, but to give sound advice, I believe I need to be honest.
The second step is to get all the organisation’s forms under control and that is no small task. Nevertheless it CAN be done. I’ve had the privilege of implementing forms management programs in a number of large organisations, both government and private enterprise, and while it takes time, the processes are straightforward. My book Managing Business Forms shows how to do it and we have some other free papers on our web site under the Free Literature heading.
In conclusion: There is no excuse for any organisation to have problems with its forms. Once management realises the enormous cost of bad forms, the solution is up to them.
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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 21st 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
FAX: (02) 6241 9023 or (INTERNATIONAL) + 61 2 6241 9023
E-MAIL: rob@RBAinformationdesign.com.au
