We must never underestimate the psychological burden of forms. Confusion is a common problem, especially when questions are replaced by cryptic field captions that the user doesn’t understand. There’s a tendency for people to panic, especially if they are elderly. We’ve done extensive research with aged people. Most had 60 or more years experience in filling out forms and many told us that they had never filled out an easy-to-use form. In fact, their experience was such that even when shown a simple form, they just expected it to be bad. We found that as soon as they detected a problem, they started to panic and worry about whether they were doing the right thing.

Other psychological burdens are frustration and anger. Ironically, while many form designers try to reduce the amount of paper in a form with small captioned boxes, the lack of sufficient space and the resulting clutter create an even bigger burden. Our observational useability testing has consistently shown that people don’t mind a multipage form as long as the questions are easy to read, easy to understand, and with adequate answer space.

Closely tied to the above burdens is the use of inappropriate language. It may be jargon, ambiguity, or even cultural. For example, Australia, like the United States, has a multi-tiered governmental structure—Federal, State and Local. Each tier has its own laws and often Departments with the same name such as Department of Health. To make matters worse, the Departments don’t talk to one another and immigrants from other countries find it difficult to understand why they often provide the same information multiple times. People become confused and frustrated.

A major cause of confusion with government forms is bureaucratic or legal language. We design many government forms and this is one of the most common problems we face. Many administrators want to use the language that’s in the legislation, but often the form fillers don’t understand it. Usually the law requires a signature, but if the person has to sign the form and honestly state that they have answered everything correctly, then they MUST understand the form. I’ve had administrators tell me that they provide a counter or phone help service to explain the form to users. My response is that if they can explain the meaning of a question in person, why not ask the question correctly in the first place. Surely, the key point about a good form is getting the correct answer, not having bureaucratically or politically correct questions.

With the downsizing of organisations, help staff are in short supply and we’re getting more and more cries for assistance from government departments that don’t have the resources to answer the questions of form fillers. While I’m not an advocate of downsizing and outsourcing, it does seem to be having a positive influence on the production of better forms as organisations try to minimise enquiries.

The burden of poor information

Then there is the burden of poor information—the burden on the public when forms are processed with errors that come back to haunt people later. Take the case of an insurance application form that has wrong information because the form’s questions were misleading or confusing. Later a claim is rejected because the insurance company finds out that the original information was wrong. The blame is placed on the form filler who loses out through no fault of their own—simply because the insurance company produced bad forms. Of course, the problem could go the other way with the insurance company having to pay out more than it needs to on a claim because of wrong information that it might not even know about.

The burden of correcting errors

The external form-filler burden leads to an internal burden—the time and cost burden on the processing staff that have to deal with the errors. In one Australian example, each year 550,000 people filled out a government application form for financial assistance. Close to 100% of the forms had one or more errors resulting in most of them being sent back to the applicants for more information. Some of the forms were sent back to users up to 4 times to get correct information. We estimated that even the basic processing cost to correct the errors was over 2 million dollars per year. The real cost was estimated to be closer to 10 million dollars; that’s around $20 per application, and that was only one form.

In another case, a State Government utility surveyed 2,000 completed forms, half of which were internal, and they found 80% to have one or more errors. Again, the error correction cost was huge.

A State Government Department had an application form for business incorporation that resulted in letters to 90% of the applicants asking for more information. They didn’t know the cost.

A state government insurance corporation allocated 20 minutes per form in its work planning just to deal with errors—and that’s the errors they knew about. Even worse were the actions of the data entry operators. Because the documents were batch processed, if there was an error that would cause a batch to be rejected, the operators would key data that they knew would be accepted. These errors were never reported to management or the applicants.

Another case was a government grant application form that had 97% of applications wrongly completed. After extensive analysis of the errors, the redesigned form was a vast improvement.

Finally, I want to refer to three major corporations that each had close to 100% of their forms with one or more errors. In two of the cases, as part of the redesign process, we conducted extensive useability studies. Subsequently, it was reported to us from one of those companies that the error rate had dropped to around 5% of forms with one or more errors. During testing, one complex 24-page form was being completed by applicants in under 30 minutes and virtually error-free. The solution was the design and testing methods that we teach in our form design courses and in our textbook Forms For People.

These burdens show that designers must consider far more than just form-filling time. The greatest cost burden to the organisation lies elsewhere.

This article is taken from Chapter 2 of Forms For People.

©  2008 Robert Barnett