I tend to make a point of saying to people that, even though it’s how I make my living. there’s not really much to be gained from having me design a simple form which asks for someone’s name, address, age etc etc. Having seen this form I’ve changed that view!
This is a typical example of the kind of basic form almost every organisation uses at some stage. Here’s a few mistakes to avoid if it becomes your job to create one.
Those boxes for the names – why?
Using these kind of boxes is actually really annoying for the user. We are used to writing words as group of letters – joined-up or not – so having to stop after each letter and move the pen about a centimetre to the right (yes, I measured it) isn’t natural.
Getting my age
3 boxes for me to put my age in would be optimistic, 6 is highly optimistic
Gender
If you’ve asked me whether I’m Mr/Ms/Miss/Mrs, and left me with no ‘Other’ option, do you really need to ask me whether I’m male or female?
Address boxes
Why are they half the height of the ones for my name? I shouldn’t ridicule this really: my writing tends to get lower and lower the more I write, probably a symptom of not writing enough.
Do you know what, I’ve had enough of moaning about this form, I’m going to redesign it – check back soon!
Hi Robert.I assume the form is designed for optical character recognition (OCR) to save someone having to type it in manually. Funny thing is I’ve seen these forms used manually. They’ve been copied by someone (who thought they were ideal for what they wanted) and then, after completion by the customer, transcribed by hand into a computer record.
Regards, Edward
Hi Edward
The OCR thing was my initial thought, but the angle of the picture above isn’t because I can’t use a scanner, it’s how it is!! Unless there is some new OCR technology that works at 5 degrees that I don’t know about.
You’ve hit the nail on the head though. As with so many of the examples of bad practice I come across, it’s people applying some convention they’ve seen somewhere else, because they don’t have the time or inclination to decide what is actually best. Another example I like to get off my chest every now and then is bar charts (instead of pie charts) to show percentages.