Fill-in forms

For me, and many other people, the filling in of forms is one of the most gut-wrenchingly difficult tasks that there is. Tax forms make me cringe, and forms connected with nasty things like car insurance claims are frightening. Often the problems associated with form filling have to do with how well they cater for your particular situation. If they match well you can just get on with it, if they match badly you spend all your time filling things in and crossing them out; 'do they mean this or do they mean that?' A small part of good form design, be they paper or on-line forms, involves guiding the user through the filling-in of the form; only asking them questions that are relevant and hiding information that is not relevant. However a deeper part of form design is the building blocks at the foundation of the very system that the form is a part of. This is the aspect I want to concentrate on here; forms as an indication of how closely systems match reality. A form that needs to be filled in is not just a means of gathering data, it is an embodiment of assumptions made by the system (and the system's designer) about who the user is and what they are doing. Forms are the 'skin' of underlying systems, and systems are often set in old ways of doing things and old ways of classifying people that don't match the real world. Here is a common example; although a huge proportion of long-term, stable relationships do not involve marriage , there is still very little recognition of this in forms and processes. For men they must either tick 'Single' or 'Married', there is no box for 'Actually living with someone for the last twenty years and fathering their kids and probably going to be with them a good sight longer'. For women it's even worse, if they have already been married and then got divorced before settling down without marrying, then for the rest of eternity there is only one thing they can choose when faced with the choice; 'Mar-ried, Single or Divorced'. Even the simple, multiple-choice questions I've been working on recently for an on-line, user survey have had to be adjusted to take all the user's eventualities into consideration. As well as the five optional choices, two extra options have been added. An 'other' …