10 Tips for electronic forms design and deployment.

1. Tips to enhance
your electronic
forms
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Scriptura Engage | Market view | 10 tips electronic forms
10
If you really want to get the most
value out of switching from paper
to electronic forms, be sure to get
your hands on the 10 tips below.
They will prove to be an invaluable
resource when designing
intelligent forms. We gathered all
tips by studying our customers’
best practices with the Scriptura
Engage Forms.
1. Use form fields
Where paper forms are cluttered with
information, electronic forms are far
more readable because of the different
types of input fields. Make use of radio
buttons, dropdown lists, checkboxes, as
much as possible to make your layout
leaner and less aggressive.
2. Prefill
If you already have some information,
prefill the form with it! Prefilling has a
double use. You make the customer
happy because he doesn’t need to spend
more time than necessary and you also
provide a means for the customer to
make corrections.
3. Personalize
Personalizing any type of
communication is a no-brainer,
especially with electronic formats that
have easy access to ad-hoc information.
Personalized forms are far more effective
than their more generic counterparts. In
my opinion it’s a great way to improve
user experience at a relatively low cost.
4. Use adaptive layout
This is where electronic forms really
jump out. If you need your respondent
to give a series of repeated information,
like a list of your children’s names, dates
of birth etc. you do not need to include
a fixed set of tables like on a paper form.
You can just show the input fields once
and add a“+”button to add more rows.
Another example is the“marital status”-
field where you only want to ask for the
name of the partner when‘married’is
checked.
5. Integrate Web Services
Online forms have the benefit they
can connect to a treasure of practical
public or internal web services. Think of
complete public lists of states and their
cities that can help to autocomplete
fields or an internal service that retrieves
contextual information from different
databases.
6. Separate interface from content
This tip focuses on applications built
with electronic forms. We have a specific
customer who built a letter generation
system where the interface to compose
a letter is in a different language than
the actual letter being published. The
customer had a lot of French speaking
resources who had to send letters all
over the world. By separating the letter
composition interface from the actual
letter produced these resources could be
re-used without additional training.
7. Go mobile
Combining the versatility of intelligent
electronic forms with the flexibility
of mobile devices creates a valuable
synergy that drastically improves
the efficiency of mobile workers.
Additionally, our electronic forms can
also tap into device specific features
like GPS, the camera, accelerometer,
gyroscope, etc.
8. Automate archiving
Remember that the‘save’or‘submit’
button at the bottom of a form can
trigger more than one follow up process.
With Scriptura Engage we include a
document flow designer where you can
graphically click processes together.
Submitting a form can trigger both the
publication of a PDF, storage of a PDF/A
in an archive system and write the data
to a database.
9. Less is more
If a user opens a form and is confronted
with an abundance of questions the
chances are high he or she will forfeit
and close the form. Using dynamic
layouts allows you to only show the
necessary fields spread over several
logically grouped pages. On top of that
the look-and-feel of the electronic forms
can change based on the data that is
provided, for example only request the
name of a spouse if someone indicates
he/she is married. The business logic and
forms functionality is retained when the
form is updated.
10. Add a‘Save’button and data
validation
Depending the type of form you should
definitely consider adding a‘save’
button. People love the flexibility of
electronic forms. You can greatly add to
that by allowing the user to pause filling
out the form and come back later to
complete the form.
Before submitting the form, Scriptura
Engage can validate the data being
submitted.
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