Designing Forms
Form design principles
Design is an important stage in the creation of forms. A well-designed form meets the user's needs, as well as your own. The following information is based upon our experience over the last four years, together with input from leading form usability specialists. We hope it will guide you through this tricky, but important area.
Additional help may be found in our Usability Guide.
Remember that with Mandoforms there are no compromises. You can design your forms with the target audience, and not your IT Manager in mind.
Create a rough draft
It is always a good idea to begin by sketching out a rough draft of your form before you start building it. You may choose to do this using graphical flow charting software or the humble pencil and paper.
To begin, write down all of the questions you can think of in no particular order. Also think of how you would validate a user's response to each question. For example you may only allow ten characters in a text field, or allow only digits, or you may make an answer to a question mandatory.
Group common functionality
Try to group your questions together into related areas. Each group will result in a page of questions displayed to the user.
For example, a registration form may be required to collect personal information such as a name and email address. This information could be grouped together. However, you could create one page to deal solely with the name of the user, collecting fields such as Title, Surname and First name. The next page could contain address details, with fields such as House Number, Street, Post Town, County and Postcode. By grouping the questions into small chunks, the user is less likely to be overwhelmed by the complexity and size of the form.
There is a balance to be achieved, however, as too many pages with just one or two questions on them can be as difficult or frustrating to use as fewer pages covered in questions. So, although there are times when a single question on a page does make sense, at other times it may be better to group together loosely related questions.
Additional text
Once you are happy with the questions and where they will appear, think of any introductory or explanatory text that may be required on each page. You may also consider using entire pages of text with no questions, such as making the first page a "Welcome Page", and the last a "Thankyou Page".
How to ask questions
Now that you have your questions divided into pages. Think of the best way of capturing the answers. For simple text entry, for example someone's name, a text box would work best. Where you expect the user to enter a large amount of text, a text area would be preferable. If there is a small number of choices to select from, then radio buttons are an obvious choice, or if there are many options then dropdown list may be better.
Create a flow chart
Analyse the questions to see whether any of them depend upon answers given to others. For instance if a user wishes to have their details removed from your database there is no point in showing all of the pages requesting personal details. You should already have these details in your database so you merely need to ask for their user id and password. Decision questions such as these are what we call navigation questions.
Map out decisions such as this in your flow chart. These decisions will make the basis for the navigation rules you will be creating to control the flow of the form.
First things first. Last things...
Try to ask navigational questions at the start of the form. Conversely, try to put questions that may be rejected by the server as close to the end of the form as possible. For instance if the user must choose their own user name and password, be sure to put these questions at the end. If their choice is rejected you do not want them to have to go back to the beginning of the form to choose again, especially if this too may be rejected.
Putting it altogether
You should now have everything you need to create your form. You can start your Builder Tool at last, and begin to create the form for real.
