I completed a form development project consisting of ten custom medical forms for a client’s small business. The project began when she handed me several Microsoft Word documents that contained form content. Each form used different formats, fonts, and inconsistent headers and footers. Like many medical forms, the fields were small and overcrowded.
My first task was to create a form template to use repeatable components (standard headers, footers, fonts, paragraph styles) for every form. Second, I developed the form layout and content. It took approximately 15 hours of development time to create 14 pages. While that may seem expensive, the long-term benefits will soon outweigh the development costs.
The short-term benefits of a professionally developed form are a consistent look and feel, promoting the business brand, being esthetically pleasing, being easy to read, and being easy for people to fill in the blanks.
The long-term benefits are inexpensive updates because the design is complete and in template form. Modifying existing content takes less time because the design is defined. When adding new forms to the library, costs are less because much of the framework is already complete, and many of the form fields that are already designed can be reused.
One last note, I use Adobe InDesign to develop my forms. InDesign is not a word processor but a page layout tool with better control over the layout and content and better graphic design capabilities.