No one likes filling out intake forms, they are often difficult to understand and fatiguing to complete. These challenges are compounded when the users trying to complete the form are living with disabilities. This project aims to understand and address the major pain points disabled individuals face when completing forms.
Project Information
How we chose our platform
When designing this solution for the Alliance of People with disAbilities it was crucial to us that the Alliance would be able to maintain and edit their new online intake form, this forced us to create our intake form using a 3rd party form creator. The alliance also had budget constraints and as a result we were unable to use paid form creators. With these two requirements, there were two solutions available to us Google forms and Microsoft forms, we decided to build our accessible form in Microsoft forms because Microsoft forms are HIPPA compliant, the Alliance already uses Microsoft products and Microsoft’s Forms platform has many accessibility features built in.
How we designed our forms
We used personas as well as interviews with future users at the Alliance to help us better understand our problem space and how we could design a form that delights our users. In one of our interviews with a worker at the Alliance it was explained to us that intake meetings were taking up to four hours to complete, this was a result of the varying ability levels of the consumers and the form fatigue that they were experiencing due to their intimidatingly dense 6 page long intake form. This discovery influenced us to group similar questions into sections and then space those sections over several pages. In addition to breaking the form into smaller cohesive pieces, we also created a progress bar to help consumers see how far they are in the form. Since the majority of our users were going to have at least one disability we knew from the onset that our form would need to be accessible both by screen readers as well as through keyboard navigation and made sure to support the needs of those users.
Our Iterative Process
After creating our first attempt at an accessible online intake form we did a lot of user testing carrying out a total of nine user tests, three of which where completed using Usertesting.com the rest were completed over zoom with individuals from the Alliance as well as potential consumers. These tests were invaluable for us in our design of this form and opened our eyes to some of the issues with our current version. With the exception of three user tests from Usertesting.com, edits where made to the form after every user test.
About Alliance of People with disAbilities
Established in 1977, Alliance of People with disAbilities is located in King County, Washington. The Alliance works hard to make our community more accessible, inclusive, and usable for everyone. Their programs are open to people with all types of disAbilities.
Key Features
Screenreader friendly
This form is not just for people with vision, low or no vision users will be able to navigate the form with a screen reader and keyboard.
Mobile First
No computer? No problem this form was designed from the very beginning to be awesome on mobile devices, swipe and tap away!
Conversational language
We kept our questions friendly and sincere so that you feel the love from the Alliance even before you meet one of their amazing workers.
Database Integration
Freeing up time extra time for the Alliance workers so that they can spend more time doing what they love, helping people, was one of the main goals of this project, a power automate flow keeps things running smoothly behind the scenes taking responses and saving them to an easy to upload format as soon as forms are submitted.
Content clustering
Birds of a feather flock together, so do the questions on our form, we took the time to group all of our similar questions together.
Presentation Video
Team Info for Good
Anh Nguyen
atnd@uw.edu
Garrett Olerud
golerud701@gmail.com
Gunhyung Cho
ghc10310@gmail.com
Wanyu Guan
wanyuguan20@gmail.com
Project Status
The project is ready to be handed to our sponsor, the Allaince. As we also discovered that our sponsor’s third party database, CIL Suite, is working on similar project, we will provide them with our research findings for additional resources.