[Guide] How to Build Great Digital and Online Forms

Configure your digital and online forms to meet your unique business needs – follow along with this guide to create intuitive digital forms, streamline onboarding, and automate common processes

Transitioning from paper-based documentation to a digital solution can feel daunting. Businesses often delay their search for a digital solution due to financial investment concerns, time and energy demands, onboarding and training requirements, and fear of disrupting their current workflows and processes. 

Digital forms and data capture rapidly address each of these concerns, allowing teams to easily create digital versions of their existing forms (or create forms entirely new versions from scratch) for use on phones, tablets, and computers. Because these forms can look just like your existing work forms, it’s easy to onboard new users and minimizes disruption for your team.

In this guide, we’ll explore what fields and features your team can implement to build powerful digital forms and provide a seamless, intuitive experience for your users. But first, let’s take a step back and consider what we’ll need our form to accomplish: 

1. Identify digital data collection goals
   Before configuring your digital or online form, take a moment to consider what you’d like it to achieve. Are you looking for a seamless client intake experience? Or gathering detailed information regarding job site hazards? This perspective will help determine what fields, features, and functionalities to include within your digital form. 

2. Consider how forms will be completed
   Will your team be completing forms from a computer or from a phone or tablet? Will employees be solely responsible for entering information or will you need third-party contributors? Digital forms are flexible, dynamic resources that can be tailored to meet your business's unique needs. This means your digital forms can be configured to be: 

   • Equipped with additional viewing modes, making it easy to toggle between views

   • Shareable with external contributors (like patients, clients, and partners)

   • Dynamic and interactive, allowing forms to display only those fields relevant to a particular user

   …and more!

3. Envision your entire data collection workflow
   Your workflow doesn’t end when you complete a form. Think carefully on how your business can put its data to work: What reports can be augmented with form data? What other systems should be enriched with this information? What clients should be automatically notified with a copy of this submitted form? 
   
   Digital data collection platforms allow your business to seamlessly move data throughout its tech stack, departments, client base, and more. By connecting your digital form solution to other solutions (like your CRM, accounting platforms, databases, dashboards, and more) your operation can establish a single source of truth for its data collection and leverage real-time data to make business decisions more efficiently and accurately. 

Now that we’ve looked at the big picture, let’s walk through how to design our digital and online forms to act as an intuitive and interactive front-end to your business’ data collection: 

1. Upload and customize your digital form
   When designing your digital form, remember to prioritize the end-user experience. With GoFormz, your users can leverage two viewing modes when filling out forms: Form View and List View. Form View presents users with an interface that looks just like their original work form, making it easy to onboard new users and maintain important formatting (GoFormz is the only digital form solution with this capability). You can also leverage List View, an ‘app-like’ index of fields, perfect for smaller screens and devices. When both views are configured, users can toggle between the two views as often as they need. A variety of fields can be added to your digital form, including Text, Image, Signature, GPS/Maps, Dates, Tables, Checkboxes, Drop Down menus, and more. Think carefully about the types of information your team will need to gather, and what fields can be added to further simplify and enhance data capture. For example, a Text field prompting users to enter job site hazards could be complemented with an Image field, where users can include a photo of the hazard – providing visual context. 

2. Make your form intuitive and interactive
   One of the major benefits of leveraging digital forms to collect information is the ability to dynamically tailor form fields to each user’s specific needs. This can be accomplished through Dynamic Field Properties and form logic. For example, fields can be dynamically made Required, Hidden/Visible, or change Background Color based on field selections, entered information, a User’s Group membership, and more. Fields can also be automatically populated with a User’s information, location, or job details when a new form is generated. 

3. Connect your form to your tech stack
   Once your data has been collected, it’s time to put it to work. By connecting your digital and online forms to your existing tech stack, your operation can easily route highly accurate data throughout your organization, in real-time. This seamless connection between your digital forms and digital systems makes it easy to optimize and accelerate existing processes, without disturbing established workflows. For example, data can be effortlessly moved between your digital forms and systems like Salesforce, Procore, Google Workspace, Microsoft 365, and so much more. This not only ensures that the entirety of your operation can rapidly leverage real-time, up-to-date information at all times, but also eliminates frequent time-wasting tasks, like data rekeying, record-keeping, and more. Learn more about digital form integrations here

4. Automate communication and collaboration
   Next, let’s consider how a completed form can spur communication and collaboration. Using Automated Workflows, your form can be configured to instantly email a copy of the completed document to another user or an email input into the form itself. Forms can also be transferred to other users when additional input is required. By automating these common collaboration functions, your team can not only save time but also ensure that critical documentation reaches key contacts as soon as a form has been completed, every time. Learn how to use Automated Workflows here >

5. Test, optimize, test again
   Once you have deployed our digital form and accompanying workflows, pay careful attention to the efficiency and effectiveness of your digital data capture process. Where are there opportunities to optimize? What fields could benefit from logic? Are there additional ways to streamline the flow of information throughout your operation? Your form Template can be easily edited and optimized without the risk of data loss, so testing and applying your findings is simple and risk-free.

Ready to get started building your own digital and online forms? Sign up for a free trial of the GoFormz digital forms and data capture platform or watch our Getting Started with GoFormz webinar, for an in-depth look at how to design, configure, and deploy your digital forms and workflows.

About GoFormz

GoFormz is a digital forms and operational data management solution that helps bring your collected data into a single location – acting as your single source of truth. We believe joining the digital transformation era should be seamless and result in simple onboarding and streamlined user adoption. Whether you need to track inventory or document employee timesheets, GoFormz can bring your existing processes to the digital realm using your exact paper forms (which no other digital solution can offer) – requiring no coding experience! To top everything off, collected data can be instantly routed to your existing tech stacks through our open API and multiple native integrations – ensuring your data is accessible in real-time.