Project Insights: Business Scholarship Application
By far the most complicated forms that we create are applications. Most recently we create the School of Business scholarship application. What makes them complicated is the overall structure of the form, they are huge. Typically broken into multiple steps with the ability to save progress along the way. Each step in itself contains pretty basic information but when you combine it with validation and overall flow from page to page things can get rough quick.
# Planning the form
Before we start any project like this we take as much time as possible to plan the entire user experience from beginning to end. This is done by getting the physical form that students use to fill out and determining every single field that needs to be submitted.
People interact with web documents completely differently than physical pieces of paper so we don't even consider the structure of the printed document in the planning stages. We start by grouping the fields in buckets of related information, these will become the steps in the form.
# When logic is involved
From there we determine the order of the fields on the page and if there's going to be sub groups within the page. Once the fields are laid out we then start to talk about logic. We ask, can any fields that can be hidden from the start? The less fields on screen the less intimidated people are to start and complete a form. We try to show them only the things they need and display any additional if necessary.
# Keeping track of attached documents
Right when someone fills out their personal information they are essentially creating an "account" for this application. They get an email with a password and link back to the application as a reminder. From here on out their progress is tracked and all documents uploaded go into a temporary directory. The last thing we want to do is to loose user documents so each step verifies the actual documents are still in the temp directory before moving on.
# Digital signature
When someone has made it through all the steps and is ready to submit we ask for a digital signature. It's nothing fancy but it does force them to agree that all the information in the form is true and they acknowledge once they submit they cannot go back and change information. It's a great way to weed out bogus applications but at the same time it holds up a lot of people from making that final step. The idea that the form cannot be changed after clicking the button leaves many apps in a state of incompleteness.
What we've found is people start the application early but end up not submitting it till 11:30 pm the night of the deadline. This seems like a fact of human nature so we have to make sure the system can handle a large number of submissions in a short period of time right before the deadline.
# Downloading the applications
After the application deadline passes it's now time to gather all the submissions and disburse for review. Depending on the needs of the department we do this several ways. Some want the entire list as a whole, others export the names in batches. Regardless things come out the same way, we make a huge excel sheet with every single field as a column. As far as the documents are concerned we create a folder for each, "lastname_#" and place all the files attached to their application in it. From here we zip them all up into one single file. This allows the department to get a checklist that they can scan or import into another system while still being able to see all the files uploaded attached to the last name and ID of the application. We keep the same filenames as they were uploaded on purpose, the less we touch the files the better. If someone calls and they had an issue and rattles off a filename that we don't have in the system it's a lot harder to figure out what's going on.
# Archiving each semester
Last but not least each semester the forms change a little. We have to archive the current semesters data in one batch then update the form and relaunch the application based on any new fields. We try to keep the database changes down to a minimum and really just change the front end form so we don't have to re-engineer the structure of the back end every time. So far this has worked out great and the tweaks have all been based on user feedback and optimizing how students fill out applications.