Re: Information on good form design for printed forms?

[David Neeley <dbneeley -at- gmail -dot- com>]

The question of "printed forms" opens a panoply of variations on the
theme that you may not be thinking of.

For example, some businesses require multi-copy NCR ("no carbon
required") forms that have some fields obscured on some copies, others
on different ones. For example, a sales order form may have one copy
that has only the customer's address info  with everything else
obscured to serve as a shipping order.

Thus, creation of multi-part forms can be a very involved process. To
fill the need, there are many software packages designed expressly for
forms work, and some that have forms capability accompanying other
pieces, however limited.

The series of questions you should address, therefore, involve how
many forms you will design and the needed complexity of them; whether
the form will need to be usable with scanning and an OCR system; how
it will be reproduced; and how often it will need to be changed, to
name a few.

If you need one of the complex multi-part forms that will be
relatively fixed once created with few future alterations, but few if
any other forms, then I think you should have a specialty forms
printer involved from the first. Obviously, they have forms design
systems and the experience to use it.

On the other hand, if you are making a relatively simple form that
will be used without any copies other than xerographic reproduction,
the situation is much simpler.

In addition to Geoff's excellent rundown, let me suggest also that you
consider who inside your organization will be using the resultling,
filled-in forms. The order in which data will be captured for input
into your business systems can make a great deal of difference in how
rapidly and accurately the form will be used internally...and, often,
it makes little difference to the customer or other person filling out
the form as to where various bits of information might be requested on
the form.

When typewriters were common, a regular mistake made in printed forms
was making the line spacing different than the typewriter's...which
made the forms devilishly difficult to fill in by typewriter. Today,
typewriters are rapidly disappearing from many businesses--and
handwritten forms are more the norm. Thus, you should allow for
sufficient room for entry of the information you seek, allowing for
wide variation in the size of handwriting.

If you have the luxury of sufficient budget for more than one color,
then this can be used effectively for identifying and pointing out
significant areas of the form. I would not, though, suggest using both
red and green due to the most common form of color blindness among the
potential users of the forms.

Two brief discussions of forms design issues are from the New York
State Office for Technology that you might find worthwhile:

http://www.oft.state.ny.us/cookbook/8_forms.htm
http://www.oft.state.ny.us/cookbook/8_printguide.htm

I hope this helps!

David

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