Rob Tannen
> Can anyone recommend best practices and guidelines for the design of > paper forms - not printed online forms, but stand-alone paper forms, > filled in by hand. Hi Rob I would have loved to include paper form design in our recent book but was persuaded that a shorter book would be a better idea. However, many of the ideas in there work just fine on paper forms. The book is: "Forms that work: Designing web forms for usability" Morgan Kaufmann/Elsevier Available from Amazon and most other bookshops. Here's a guide as to which chapters are applicable: Introduction: what is a form - works for paper 1. Persuading people to answer - works for paper. 2. Asking for the right information - definitely works for paper, and some of the things we recommend such as watching people deal with the incoming forms are a lot easier to do with paper 3. Making questions easy to answer - definitely works for paper 4. Writing instructions - definitely works for paper 5. Choosing forms controls - irrelevant, no help for paper 6. Making the form flow easily - not much that's relevant to paper 7. Taking care of the details - works for paper 8. Making the form look easy - the sections on grids and grouping are relevant 9. Testing - definitely works for paper. If you'd like some online resources, then try two papers (I wrote both of them about paper forms): "Designing usable forms: the three-layer model of the form" http://www.formsthatwork.com/articlespapers/form.asp "Understanding the costs of data capture" http://www.formsthatwork.com/articlespapers/datacapture.asp Hope this helps. Best Caroline Jarrett ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
