ProTip: Best Practices for Naming Your Form Fields
Never lose sight of a form field again
When you’re preparing to convert a PDF to a fillable form within the GoFormz platform, there are a couple of thoughts that should come to mind:
What is the problem I am trying to solve with this digital form?
How can I make this a seamless process for the form user?
Who is filling out this form and will they find this process helpful?
While these questions should be top of mind when building all your mobile forms, they’re especially important when it comes to digitizing your existing paper forms. The best way to ensure a seamless, streamlined form creation and completion process is to start with an organized and well-labeled Template. Most of this organization starts with naming your Template Fields, otherwise known as your form fields.
How to Name a Form Field
Naming form fields is easy and only takes a few seconds to do. When you drag and drop a Template Field onto your digital form, the Properties Panel will automatically populate on the right-hand side of your screen. Locate the ‘Name’ field at the top of the Properties Panel and rename the field to any desired, identifiable name. This is critical because as you drag and drop form fields onto your digital form, they numerically build upon themselves. For example, if you drag and drop a Text field onto your digital form, the name of that field will automatically be Text 1. After you add ten more Text fields to the digital document, the next Text field to be added to the form will be Text 11 – making it extremely difficult to differentiate between your form fields.
GoFormz Features Made Easier By Naming Fields
A vast number of GoFormz features are easier to use, navigate, and tweak when form fields are named properly. Here are a few features that GoFormz users have found to be extremely helpful when they are named accurately in their digitized documents:
Required fields: If a form user attempts to submit a lengthy digital form without a Required field filled out, they will get a notification stating that a specific field needs to be completed before the user can submit that document. Within that notification will be the actual name of the form field. If the Required field is named ‘Signature 20’, that can be rather challenging to locate. While the latest web version update can minimize this confusion, naming the field something descriptive will be extremely helpful.
Setting up Calculations: Calculations are used to elicit specific actions from specific form fields. When form fields are named, you can simplify the process of building complications, saving yourself time and hassle.
Public Forms: When you send Public Forms to outside users of your organization, like clients, and they don’t complete a specific field before attempting to submit their online form, they will get a notification that calls out a specific form field that requires their attention. If this form field isn’t named properly, the client might see the form field name as ‘Text 22’, which can be a poor user experience.
Setting up a Workflow from specific fields: When setting up Automated Workflows, data can be pulled from specific form fields and routed to colleagues, team members, placed in dashboards, and much more. Therefore, when creating your digital forms, it’s best to name your form fields so you know exactly what data is being pulled from the digital form.
Whether you have one form field or hundreds, naming your form fields can be the difference between searching your online forms for a specific field for seconds or minutes. Simplify your processes even more with this best practice – get started today!
