PDF Form Design

[Gruden]

As a digital agency, we design and build user interfaces.

And the essence of this is about communication, understanding user and business needs, and then designing the most effective and engaging interfaces, which can be presented in a number of formats from HTML to iPhone.

But we should not overlook another user interface on most web sites: the humble PDF.

Nearly every government or commercial web site has PDFs. The number can vary from one to thousands, and they are used for everything from fact sheets to complex financial product applications.

And it’s not uncommon for the appearance of PDFs to be inconsistent with the web site on which they are published. Often they have been propagated directly from the original paper version. And this means that the same mistakes and cost burdens associated with the original paper version are also propagated.

In many respects the design of paper forms was originally driven by necessity, and the need to cram as much as possible into a limited space. Forms were often cluttered and visually confusing, sometimes reflecting the needs and agendas of multiple stakeholders, and there was little scope to provide guidance to help the person who was supposed to fill it out.

Over the years there have been many studies of forms and the problems caused through bad design. High error rates or incompletion obviously results in significant cost overheads for the organizations handling the form.

The best example of a badly designed form was the green I-94W Arrival/Departure card that had to be completed for travel to the United States. It was one of those forms that seemed to be designed to deliberately trick you. And even though you knew that you would, you always made the same mistake by putting your family name and first name in the wrong places.

Adobe’s introduction of LiveCycle presented many organizations with the opportunity to upgrade their static PDFs to interactive versions, enabling customers and employees to complete forms online, avoid the tedium of printing and manual handling, but still have the freedom to save the original and work on it offline.

But interactive PDFs also require a fresh approach to design, in the same way we approach the design of any online application’s user interface.

The first step is understanding the users, those who will provide the information, and the stakeholders, those who will use the information: Who they are, their needs, skill levels, behaviour and language; how they want the information presented; and how it is expected or required they act.

Subject matter expertise can be leveraged for help text, tutorials and field-level business rules which can make an enormous difference to downstream handling costs.

By designing the form using the “less is more” principle it’s possible to provide users with a much more visually appealing form. Opening and collapsing content can eliminate confusion. Prudent use of interactive rich media can help users visualize outcomes to gain better understanding.

Another opportunity is to leverage the content available in a content management system or to personalize the form with a user’s details from a CRM.

Too often PDF forms on web sites ignore accessibility standards for online application design. They must be consistent.

Good technical design must be applied. And it goes without saying that testing needs to be the same as for any online system, including elements such as performance and browser compatibility.

The end result of this is to create not only the optimal user experience, but through that reduce the cost of handling and the time to get things done, and to improve the interaction with customers and the opportunities to do business.



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