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 not conformity to rules

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.

Quality is not preference

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.

Quality is not fancy features

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.

Quality is more than good printing

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