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.

Don’t be mislead by printing industry and market research hype

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 

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

We have a separate publication listing books and articles on forms and related subjects.

©  2005 Robert Barnett

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 21^st 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 

For more information

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