There are pages within many forms that are required disclosures or instructions that should accompany the form. These pages typically only contain text and serve no purpose in the automation process. When Quik! builds forms, text-only pages are ignored, but when designing the form, these text-only pages should follow the same form and design discussed throughout this guide.

Instructional

Text that serves as instructional should be well-formatted for clarity and ease of reading. If the instructional text requires a full page, the text should follow the same good techniques of building a user guide, presentation or company memo – use bullet points where necessary, proper indentations and spacing, and perform spelling and grammar checks.

Contracts, Disclaimers and Legal Text

QUIK! TIP: If a field is nested within text-only pages, make the field large and obvious to the user.

Contracts, disclaimers and legal text should be large enough to read and small enough to minimize the number of pages required. Some forms format legal text using multiple columns on the same page to break up the length of the text. While columns read well on printed document, columns are difficult to read electronically so when choosing columns, consider how the text will be read. A good compromise for reading in a columnar format is to only use two columns, not three or more.

If a signature and other inputs are required on a page that is mostly text, be sure to make the field areas sufficiently large to show the user that there is an action required on the page. It is easy to miss a signature line when reviewing a text-only page because many form authors use a small font size for the legal text and continue to use the small font size for the signature line.

Brochures and Marketing

QUIK! TIP: Marketing information is best as part of a brochure or marketing document and is not necessary for most electronic form automation processes.

Since a company’s form is often one of the only pieces of information that a client sees from the company, it is important for most companies to prominently display their logo on the form. In addition, some forms are nested within brochures and marketing information. The marketing information serves as both an education and instructional piece for the user and their client, as well as an opportunity to display the company’s brand. While marketing pieces are very useful in a paper-based process (e.g. the user only fills out the paper with a pen), marketing pieces cause users to print unnecessary pages and to handle (and ignore) extra pages within their overall document. For example, some product companies include 10 pages of marketing information with their IRA forms where the IRA forms are only a few pages long, resulting in a large PDF file size for pages that the user doesn’t use electronically (the user typically has these marketing pages physically in their hand before they print the actual form).