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

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.

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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.