Requirements Of Forms Design

Forms design follows analyzing forms, evaluating present documents, and creating new or improved forms. Bear in mind that detailed analysis occurs only after the problem definition stage and the beginning of designing the candidate system. Since the purpose of a form is to communicate effectively through forms design, there are several major requirements:

1. Identification and wording. The form title must clearly identify its purpose. Columns and rows should be labeled to avoid confusion. The form should also be identified by firm name or code number to make it easy to reorder.

2. Maximum readability and use. The form must be easy to use and fill out. It should be legible, intelligible, and uncomplicated. Ample writing space must be provided for inserting data. This means analyzing for adequate space and balancing the overall forms layout, administration, and use.

3. Physical factors. The form's composition, color, layout (margins, space, etc.), and paper stock should lend themselves to easy reading. Pages should be numbered when multipage reports are being generated for the user.

4. Order of data items. The data requested should reflect a logical sequence. Related data should be in adjacent positions. Data copied from source documents should be in the same sequence on both forms. Much of this design takes place in the forms analysis phase.

5. Ease of data entry. If used for data entry, the form should have field positions indicated under each column of data and should have some indication of where decimal points are (use broken vertical lines).

6. Size and arrangement. The form must be easily stored and filed. It should provide for signatures. Important items must be in a prominent location on the form.

7. Use of instructions. The instructions that accompany a form should clearly show how it is used and handled.

8. Efficiency considerations. The form must be cost effective. This means eliminating unnecessary data and facilitating reading lines across the form. To illustrate, if a poorly designed form causes 10 supervisors to waste 30 seconds each, then 5 minutes are lost because of the form. If the firm uses 10,000 of these forms per year, then 833 hours of lost time could have been saved by a better forms design.

9. Type of report. Forms design should also consider whether the content is executive summary, intermediate managerial information, or' supporting-data. The user requirements for each type often determine the final form design.