tips and tricks
5 tips for quick and easy form creation
When it comes to digitalising business processes, online forms are an important tool. By keeping your communications efficient, you can collect data, automate services and generate leads. Digitalised processes ensure that you save time while staying one step ahead of the competition.
Here are 5 tips for streamlining your form creation process from the initial idea to a successful form.
First of all, think about what you want to achieve with your form. A clear goal will help you decide about the data you need and the form fields that you will need for collecting this data. You should also think about the structure that you need for your online form. Ideally, there should be one central theme that runs through your form, which should start with general, easy-to-answer questions and leave special topics to the end. While you create your online form, you can check back with your goal to make sure you’re on track. This keeps your work precise and efficient.
In our online lives, we’ve already filled out hundreds of forms. Most of these follow a standardised layout and use labels with which everyone’s familiar. You should follow these kinds of standards when creating your forms. This not only saves time but helps users during the completion process. Localise your translated forms and make sure you have accounted for country-specific details – when asking for address data, for example.
Helps is at hand here from Formcentric, which offers you a wide range of templates for handling typical form creation scenarios. You can either use the template as is or adapt it to your needs, perhaps by adding a specific form field to a contact form, for example, so that your user can enter their customer number from your company. If you do use form templates, remember the principle of ‘data minimisation’, and ensure that you only ask for the data that you actually need. If in doubt – shorten your form. Users are always happy to deal with forms that can be completed quickly. And is anyone happy to enter personal details into a form if it’s not clear why they are being asked to do so? As a business, you also save time by only having to evaluate the data that you actually require.
Formcentric offers optimised form fields for many different use cases. If you want to ask for the user’s date of birth, for example, you can simply use the ‘Date’ form field. You then use ‘Validation’ to specify the required format. Formcentric can now check the date as soon as it has been entered by the user. Alongside conventional form fields, it’s also easy to include a file upload field. For a customer complaint form, this could be used to submit invoices or other documents.
Many forms use the same types of fields – to ask users for their name, address and customer number, for example. With Formcentric, you only need to create these form fields once and can then reuse them whenever you need to. The online form manager can be used to group frequently used form fields into sets. You can then add them to your next form with a simple click.
Do you perhaps need a new form that’s very similar to a form which you have already created? Formcentric lets you copy existing forms that you can then edit to add only the elements that are actually new. This not only saves you time, but ensures consistency throughout all your online forms – and in the data that they collect.
Formcentric is available in three different products. We will answer your questions about the product at any time.
