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.

Usability News

Here's another good source of information on usability: Usability News.
Once you're there it's worth doing a search on "Caroline's Corner", where you'll find lots of articles by Caroline Jarrett on usability, some of which deal with forms.

Label field alignment and eye-tracking for online forms

I've just finished reading a paper by Das, McEwan and Douglas on a report of eye-tracking for label alignment in online forms. While it didn't really say anything new, I found it interesting that it confirmed what we'd already learned over the past 25 years through observational studies and usability testing. That is, it is faster for users to have labels for lists of ballot boxes right aligned to the boxes rather than left aligned with a gap between the label and the box.  It is effectively no different to what should generally happen with paper forms.

The paper title is "Using Eye-tracking to Evaluate Label Alignment in Online Forms".

It can be purchased here.

Why do IT people make forms and procedures an after thought?

After forty plus years in the business I'm still amazed at how many IT people think forms and procedures are unimportant.

Go to a meeting and talk to analysts and as soon as the subject comes up their eyes glaze over as if it is too childish to discuss. When we tell them we design forms and write procedures they generally aren't the slightest bit interested.

Sometimes I come across someone who understands as I did recently at a meeting at IBM, but that is rare indeed.

Yet how many systems have you come across that don't do what they are supposed to do because the data collection part of the system doesn't work properly. Most systems start and often finish with forms. They often need forms during the process as well. The trouble is that IT people tend to think that because it is on a computer screen, the form is no longer a form. Yet the same general principles apply as for paper forms. Even worse are the forms often created by web designers who think that they are different again. There are some technical differences due to the way people use the screens over paper entry, but these are only minor compared to issues such as getting the language and data entry sequence right.

I often tell such people that if they don't think forms analysis is a big subject then why does it take a 500 page text book to tell people how to do it?

You'd think that after nearly 50 years of business computing and having systems fail over and over again, that they'd learn some lessons.

When will they ever learn that if they want their computer system to work properly for the end users, then they should get the forms and procedures right FIRST—before they start writing code?

When will they ever learn that forms analysis and procedures analysis are specialised professions?

BFMA Forms Symposium

The Business Forms Management Association has issued the catalog for the 2009 Symposium to be held in San Antonio Texas in April. You can get a copy from our web site at http://www.RBAinformationdesign.com.au.

I wish I was able to go, but it won't be possible this year.

The Symposium is a fantastic place to meet other forms professionals and to learn the latest about forms technology and related issues.

Forms for Rudd Government new projects

I see from the weekend edition of the Australian Financial Review that the new Rudd Government is starting to introduce new projects such as the Dementia Services Pathways Project.

Like all such projects, it will have business forms as part of the services it provides, especially in this case as it involves not just people with dementia, but their carers and service providers.

Given the huge number of errors that occur in data collected on government forms as a result of poor design methodology, my hope is that the Department of Health and Ageing and the company that undertakes the project will consider the needs of the end users.

As I've said numerous times, there is no need for forms that collect bad data.