The way we design digital forms often mimics the way printed forms were designed back in the days. Unfortunately, many of these printed forms are still being heavily used today, especially in complex environments such as healthcare, insurances, B2B, institutions, political bodies and many others. In light of pandemic, many of these companies and organizations have been finally moving to digital, replacing their printed artefacts with digital counterparts.
You are working with multi-national insurance companies, investment companies, banking services, healthcare companies and legal firms. More specifically, you are creating digital journeys out of outdated printed forms and PDFs. Your current client is a large global insurance company that only recently launched a project to transition to digital. In their case, a common way of filling in a form requires users to print out a PDF, fill it in manually, sign it, and send it by post or hand it over to office desks in person.
Usually this process is very slow and expensive, with a lot of back and forth and waiting involved. Plus, users often forget to submit important information, some of the input contains mistakes that needs to be corrected first, and processing time has been growing over the years.
Unfortunately, the insurance domain is quite complex, so each PDF often contains 15–20 pages (example 1, example 2). And usually customers have to complete 5–6 PDFs for complex inquiries. Your client is struggling to make it work — luckily they have you to help them!