Designing print forms is a completely new territory for me, and many of the conventions and recommendations diverge from Web design. For example, one of the major takeaways from the Ohio Forms Management guide [PDF] was their strong recommendation to use ULC or box-style forms. Web forms, while they do use boxes, don’t flow that way by default. To an extent, the left-side caption has become the convention online, but print forms rely on different visual cues.
The election guide also struck me as encouraging very simple designs, almost to the point of being “dumbed down.” For an election, this is probably appropriate, since your audience runs the entire gamut of skill and intelligence levels. It’s a harsh reminder of how far ahead some of us are, but a necessary one since many forms have that wide audience.
A lot of the principles in form design cross over with market research and survey design, a field I’m currently involved in. Specifically, the guidelines about consistency and conciseness align very closely to survey principles. This makes sense, because both a form and a survey are trying to guide a person through a particular thought process as smoothly as possible.
I thought the discussion on co-operative forms was a good addition because we often think of simplicity from the form creator’s perspective more than the form user’s perspective. This ties in to general information ergonomics, but it’s a critical point because, as the example shows, having the user input their post code is more work for the programmer, but it makes a huge difference to the user.