In praise of a good form
Nobody dreams of designing a better form. Perhaps they should. A good form is one of the quietest, kindest pieces of design there is, and a bad one quietly costs you the truth.
A form is really a conversation between someone who needs to know something and someone who knows it. Most forms are a bad conversation. They ask the wrong things, in the wrong order, in language the person filling them in would never use. The result is predictable. People guess, they leave blanks, or, given the smallest excuse, they decide it is not worth the bother and say nothing at all.
A bad form does not get you less risk
That last outcome is the dangerous one. When a near-miss form is long, dull and only reachable from a desk, you do not end up with fewer hazards. You end up with fewer reports of them, which feels the same on paper and is the opposite in reality. The hazard is still there. You have simply switched off the instrument that could see it.
So the design of the form is not administrative tidiness. It quietly decides what your organisation will ever know about itself.
What good looks like
The people who study this, from the UK Government Digital Service to usability researchers like Caroline Jarrett, keep arriving at the same handful of principles. They are not complicated.
- Ask only what you will actually use. Every extra field is a small tax on honesty. If you will not act on the answer, do not ask the question.
- One thing at a time. A single clear question beats a wall of boxes. People answer what they understand and skip what they do not.
- Plain words. Use the language the person already speaks, not the language of the policy that created the form.
- Make the honest path the easy path. Sensible defaults, no needless logins, capture at the point of work. The right thing to do should also be the least effort.
A near-miss report that takes four minutes and a login will always lose to the temptation to let it go. One that takes thirty seconds on a phone gets filled in.
Clear writing here is a form of respect. It tells the person on the other end that you value their time and their answer enough to make it easy. That respect comes back as better data, which is the whole point.
The best forms are invisible
You never notice a well-made form. You move through it without friction and forget it at once. You only ever notice the bad ones, the ones that make you hunt for a reference number you do not have, or choose between options that do not fit. Getting it right is unglamorous, careful work. It is also where the truth gets in, or does not.
References
- UK Government Digital Service, Service Manual: designing good forms and asking users for information. gov.uk/service-manual/design.
- Caroline Jarrett and Gerry Gaffney, Forms that Work: Designing Web Forms for Usability (Morgan Kaufmann, 2009); see also Nielsen Norman Group on form design, nngroup.com.
