Paperless Office

I've just about finished reading "The Myth of the Paperless Office" by Abigail J. Sellen and Richard H. R. Harper

What a great book! I can highly recommend it.

My thoughts on it are well summed up by two comments on the back of the dust jacket:

"Paper is the old-fashioned technology that refuses to die—and for good reason. As this pioneering study by Sellen and Harper shows, paper supports many needs and work styles better than any other medium. As a result, paper is the perfect complement to electronic documents, superior at many things, inferior at many. Want to know if an organization is working efficiently" Sellen and Harper say to check the wastebaskets—they should be full."

"The authors approach their subject with academic rigour, observing real organisations to find out how people like to work."

It has some amazing revelations about their research into the way people actually work.

Old fashioned form design

Over the past few years I've been acquiring numerous old books on office management and especially forms management and design for my archives. Some go back to the early 1900's.

This week another arrived—a little more recent—published almost 40 years ago.

Skimming through it I found that it was a great book for its time, but it drew my attention to the fact that most forms I look at or download from various web sites don't look any different in style to what is in this book.

When are form designers going to learn that old methods of layout have proven to lead to massive data entry errors?

Forms researchers have learned a great deal in the past 15 to 20 years, so its about time they brought their knowledge up to date. Our web site has a lot of information in the Free Literature area. There's even more information in my book "Forms For People: designing forms that people can use", which is available from us or in the USA from the www.BFMA.org.

I'm currently working on a new textbook that deals with public-use forms in even more detail and shows how user errors can be dramatically reduced.