Forms are a convenient way for bureaucracies to collect information. They’re convenient because they offload the work to the patient/customer/taxpayer.

The shift in labor led to an explosion of self-serve forms, but the built-in inefficiencies punish everyone.

  1. Organizations don’t see the cost of inefficient or badly designed forms, since the user engages in private.
  2. Organizations continue to add more to the forms, since it doesn’t cost them much to do so.
  3. Legacy systems and forms persist, because it’s expensive and organizationally challenging to upgrade them.

The fundamental inefficiency is this–the form creator has to imagine all the possibilities before printing the form that will be used for years. As a result, the user finds themself plowing through irrelevant questions, because the form is already set. You are 9 years old and the form wants to know how many kids you have. You live in Buffalo and the form asks about a New York City resident tax…

There are four problems here.

  • The first is that time is wasted by every single user, every time.
  • Because there’s so much nonsense, even alert users glaze over and skip over things that might be important.
  • The form can’t check for errors and inconsistencies, and can’t prioritize the questions with the most important ones first.
  • And most of all, the form is unable to intelligently dive deeper on the areas that matter.

When we moved to online forms and PDFs, almost nothing changed. By building an analog of the paper form, we captured all the kruft and waste and redundancy without adding much in the way of value. Tell me again why we need to sign this 24 page electronic document in 9 places?

Leaving technology out of this for a moment, imagine what intake might be like if, instead a form, you were talking to a human who could make decisions based on what you said? If you’re applying for a visa to Spain, they wouldn’t ask you questions that are irrelevant to this fact over and over again. But they might ask if you’ve had a travel vaccine yet.

This person wouldn’t keep asking you for your name and birthdate, over and over. You already told them.

Even more powerfully, though, a thoughtful person who heard that you had a problem with your spleen when you were a teenager would go on to ask you a number of clarifying questions about this issue, not simply instruct you to jump to the next box on the form.

AI is already capable of doing this, and with some training, I’m imagining it could do an ever better job than a human interviewer. It could have more domain knowledge, more patience and provide (some people) a greater sense of privacy.

A dialog (even by audio if that’s what the user benefits from) would take far less time and yield far more information, presented in a much more useful format. And it could highlight any missing information or discrepancies in the report it creates. It would also score the way it was trained, highlighting for the bureaucracy that they were asking for dumb things or creating user frustration.

It would save millions of hours of user time, but much more usefully, it would save lives.

If it’s worth filling out a form, it’s probably worth replacing the form with an actual gathering of information.