Reducing processing costs with intelligent forms design
Reducing processing costs with intelligent forms design
July/August Edition, 2007: People hate filling out forms. Faced with a form, people tend to become passive. If something is not immediately obvious, they will enter nothing. So are they stupid or did you give poor directions?
At 11pm, in late March 2006, 2000 kilometers from Cyclone Larry’s path of destruction, Craig Dartnell and his team were in Howick Design’s offices in Kent Street, Sydney.
But while working on a form Dartnell’s company had been commissioned by the Federal Government to design, John Howard was announcing relief packages for victims affected by the cyclone that hit the North coast of Queensland just days before.
For Dartnell, it wasn’t long before he realized he was designing the forms that victims of Cyclone Larry would soon be using to apply for relief.
It’s with this example that Dartnell’s message of considering the emotional, mental and physical state of people you’re trying to communicate with through forms, really makes sense. It’s also why graphic designers, secretaries and business owners are not necessarily in the best position to create forms. When it comes to spend, Dartnell points out that organisations often spend so much time thinking about the printing cost, they fail to consider processing, which according to a US study by Gartner Group and Price Waterhouse Coopers, amount to $97 for every dollar spent on printing.
Although an unusual area of design to be working in, Dartnell has been working in forms design for almost two decades now. It all started back in 1989 when Dartnell took on the task of designing forms for Westpac. Working in an environment where 2 million forms might need to be printed then processed, he realized there was an ‘art’ to forms design. Mastering this art would ultimately lead to minimising processing costs.
During the 1990s when Westpac restructured, Dartnell found himself alone – his four team members had been cut loose and it was up to him alone to design forms for Westpac and all its subsidiaries. After this, he decided to pursue his own business interests and established Howick Design, specialising in corporate forms design. Eventually he formed what he calls ‘a natural alliance’ with OCR software vendor, ReadSoft.
While many people look at OCR/ICR (Optical and Intelligent Character Recognition) from a techno-centric viewpoint, using recognition rates as the standard by which OCR and ICR engines can be judged, Dartnell takes a forms-centric view. “You can scan any document but the success of OCR depends on the form,” he says. “So many people think of forms at the last minute. Consequently a lot of forms are either designed by inexperienced people or in a rush.”
The ultimate goal of forms is to capture the information you have deemed necessary to process an action, be it a claim, application or change of details. The best means to keeping costs down, is to minimize the error rate on responses to ensure the information on the form can be efficiently extracted. After all, you don’t want to print one million four-page forms only to realize you’ve just created a few thousand working hours of downstream error-correction. Dartnell believes that by avoiding these ancillary costs, a ‘balancing act’ can be developed between user needs and marketing, scanning, systems and print requirements.
“It must be economical and fit in with scanner requirements,” says Dartnell. “You need to balance the different needs, systems constraints and printing requirements. We do the balancing act to get it to an acceptable state, particularly when legal and compliance issues are involved.”
Dartnell’s experience shows that everyone responds differently to forms. “You need to use the question in a way that aids the person to give you the right answer,” he says. As an example, Dartnell points out a financial institution attempting to target customers from the lower end of the socio-economic scale. The form asked respondents to list their ‘liabilities’ and ‘assets’, and consequently returned one of the worst response rates Dartnell had come across. To fix the problem, he suggested a brief explanation of what assets and liabilities are, significantly increasing the response rate the second time around.
Another issue Dartnell frequently faces is dealing with clients who haven’t yet determined the distinction between what they want on a form and what they actually need. “There is also a lot of legacy information in forms because it’s always been there,” he says. “When you look closely at the form, you can often change what’s been there since day one.”
A procedure that is often neglected in the haste of getting the forms out to people is the testing phase. Dartnell believes before releasing a form into the wild, it’s vital to test how people respond to your forms by preparing a mockup, and organizing one-on-one testing to verify and isolate problem areas.