The Benefits of Modular Form Design

There are many drawbacks to being able to create, maintain and support legacy 8x11 paper-based forms. While businesses are in the process of updating their forms to be web enabled, device agnostic, and paper free, it is now the time to address how content is built and structured to eliminate the pains of the past. Thus, why we are seeing organizations move toward a modular design methodology.

Embracing a modular form design allows for strong content governance to be imposed. Often the department who oversees the creation and maintenance of the form is not in control of the actual content for the form; an example of this could be legal terms and conditions. Modular form designs allow the specific content to be broken out of the form to enable content owners to be able to maintain their pieces separately from the functionality of the form itself.

Taking this a step further, marketing can now have tighter control on the look and feel for content being created. As the appearance does not affect the logic and functionality of the form this should be separated to allow creative control to the creative team; an example of this could be a company wide rebranding exercise. This modular design would also allow for managing multiple different brandings of the same content without having duplicates.

Through modular design the development cycle is drastically reduced. This is because sections of forms that are used in multiple locations are created as reusable chunks. The development, testing and approvals have already been completed on previously created pieces, creating a ready built library of assets to quickly build out new forms; an example of some commonly used elements could be contact information or headers and footers.

Lastly it is important to highlight how much time is saved while maintaining forms that have been created through modular design. Changes are done at a central location and pushed out to all the other forms that are using that reference. Everything from specific verbiage, styling, and layouts can and should be separated out reducing the number of places a change needs to be made to a single location.

In the upcoming weeks, to better understand the benefits of modular form design I will look at specific features that reduce maintenance and development costs, reduce time to market, increase brand awareness and improve individual user experiences.