Building User Friendly Forms: Key Tips

[sdrummond]

Collecting complete and accurate paperwork from construction workers is a challenge. Their work is very physically demanding, often with extended hours. The last thing they want to do at the end of a long, hard day, understandably, is administrative work.

I first learned this when I started as a construction safety administrator.  Most often, I was being handed paperwork that had spent the week jammed between the seats of a truck, stained with coffee and handwriting that matched that of chicken scratch.  And that’s if I got the paperwork at all.  

While electronic forms are the answer, building one isn’t as simple as copying and pasting your questions.  At least, it shouldn’t be. You should make filling out the form straightforward, fast, and as painless as possible for your installers. When you accomplish that, there is a better chance they will complete the submission with accurate and relevant information.  

For the last decade, I have been perfecting the art of successful form building for contractors, and I am excited to share with you the four ways to do it, specifically for forms built in your ServiceTitan account.

1. Avoid Text Fields

Always opt for selection options rather than blank text boxes.  An open-ended question with a blank text space will often garner incomplete or irrelevant information.  Providing selectable options to your installers reminds them of their options and lets them select the accurate response.  

Selectable options also keep your data consistent, making reporting more straightforward.  For example, if you have an open-ended question about why the job is delayed, you may receive very different responses that all essentially mean the same thing, i.e., ‘changes to the scope of work.’  If, instead, you provide a selectable option for ‘scope of work’ in addition to others, you will very quickly be able to see how many times that option was selected in your reporting. 

In the form builder in your ServiceTitan account, stick with field types of checkboxes, radio buttons, dropdowns, and stoplights.  It will take more time to set up than a text box, but your data will be more accurate, and your field workers will thank you!

2. Use Required Fields

Likely, the most simple but essential tool in the forms feature is the ability to set specific questions as required.  Taking some time when configuring your form to decide which questions are mission-critical means the technician won’t be able to submit the form without including that information.  Never again will you have to call someone to find out which piece of equipment they were referring to if your ‘Equipment Serial” field is set as required. 

At the same time, don’t overuse the setting by marking every field as required. Fields such as “Additional Comments” will collect useless information if marked required, and the installer has nothing to include. Considering the requirements for each field will keep your form easy to use and your data complete. 

3. Set Up Conditional Logic

Ensuring your forms collect only relevant information and aren’t unnecessarily long is crucial.  Any field that isn’t relevant one hundred percent of the time can be displayed or hidden based on information provided earlier in the form using conditional logic. 

For example, you may have a question relevant only to your commercial business unit and may confuse your residential team. The first step in this scenario is to make sure you have a qualifying question earlier in the form.  In this case, it would be “Business Unit”.  

You then create a rule that shows this additional field when ‘commercial’ is selected in that qualifying question.  When the conditions are met, the additional field will appear.  

You can get more advanced when determining your conditions, which is reviewed in our knowledge base article on conditional logic. However, I recommend keeping it simple, especially as you are learning. 

As a  bonus, you can make a field with conditions applied ‘Required,’ and it will only be required when the conditions are met! For example, you can have a multiple-select question and include ‘other’ as an option.  You could then have a text field that follows to ‘Describe Other.’  You would create a rule with conditional logic to show the text field only if “Other” is selected.  You can then make that text field required so they must enter an answer, but only when that question appears / ‘other’ is selected.  

4. Consider Triggers

Instead of your employees waiting until the end of the day to complete their admin work, help them manage their time by prompting them with triggers. A trigger will fire a pop-up for the technician and require/remind them to complete the form. The prompt for the trigger can be based on the job, the customer, the location, or the equipment.  

For example, a trigger can prompt a closeout/lockout form on any job with a “High Voltage" tag.  Or maybe you want to trigger a tune-up form for the additional equipment on site on all installation jobs with an invoice value over a certain amount.   A trigger could also be set to prompt based on an event, such as the installer arriving on site and needing to conduct a hazard assessment. 

The final type of trigger available is one tied to a technician. This would apply to forms not connected to a job, such as a morning vehicle circle check. 

Bonus

Coming in the next release (Jan 2024) is a new reporting capability for Form Submissions. In the past, you have yet to be able to pull data collectively from multiple forms. You could access the data for each form submission. However, if you wanted analytics on the answers to one form question from numerous submissions, that wasn’t possible. Until now! Well, almost now! 

So, ensure your forms are set up to collect the best data in the fastest and easiest way so you can start analyzing it and uncovering trends as soon as the release is live. 

Get Started

Forms are one of the most powerful tools ServieTitan offers due to their versatility, customization capabilities, and the analytics they can deliver. The use cases for forms are endless; if appropriately designed, they won’t annoy or exhaust those filling them out.  Essentially, any task requiring capturing field information can be done through forms.  

Here are some ways you may benefit from using forms:

• Arrival checklist
• Jobsite hazard assessment
• Progress report 
• Material delivery notice
• Employee infractions
• Job completion checklist
• Job completion client sign off
• Safety Inspection
• Lead generation

In the comments, tell me the forms you love to use and how you will use the new form submission report!

[EileenMcGeean]

Yes, forms are the answer for us to get up to date information (and not rely on our memories!)

You caution against using too much text on a form. I did need some text and really struggled with making the fields text compatible since we did not subscribe to a version of Adobe that provided fillable forms. I had to edit the text with an online PDF editor then upload. It was time consuming. Can the whole process be reduced to less steps?

[sdrummond]

Hi Eileen!  Thanks for the feedback.  This article was specific to forms designed and built within your ServiceTitan account.  I can certainly understand the need for more text boxes on a PDF form.  User feedback is very important to us and we would love to hear about your ideas to make the experience easier on our ideas board here: https://ideas.community.servicetitan.com/