After you've finished your form and you've got a questionnaire and it works and the form works and everything, there's a number of kind of finishing touches that you can put on a questionnaire.

The most important one and I'm gonna gonna go through a bunch of it here but first the most important one is the one that we covered last week but I'll cover it here too. The most important one is fewer questions. You want to reduce the number of questions asked as much as possible. Here I've got an example with six questions. This asks is the buyer married, the name of the buyer's spouse, then the next pair asks for the name of the seller, and then it asks for is the seller a company or an individual, And then the third pairing here asks for is the property zone for industry and then it asks is the property within city limits.

Those, can be reduced.

Just literally the number of questions there can be drastically reduced. Here I'm collecting the same amount of information with only three questions.

Instead of asking is the buyer married, what's the name of the buyer's spouse, I can ask what's the name of the buyer's spouse if any.

If this is left blank then I know the buyer is unmarried so I've gathered the same amount of information with just one question.

Here instead of asking is the seller a asking for the name of the seller and then is the seller a company or an individual I just ask for the name of the seller but I make this a text with pronoun type answer so that in addition to typing the name they're asked to provide a pronoun.

If they choose it then I know that's a company not an individual.

So I've collected all the information I need in just a single question. And here on the last one the first uh-uh question zoned for industry? And I've got a yesno answer here. And then the next one asks, Is the property within city limits? With a yesno answer here. But look what I've done down below. I ask a single question, type of property.

It's less for the user to read for one thing. That's nice. Anytime we can ask them to read fewer words than more words, that's better.

And then for their response I've given them a drop down box that has four choices.

Industrial within city limits, industrial outside city limits, non industrial within city limits and non industrial outside city limits. So they're only having to read one thing.

They're only having to click once on that little down arrow. They're only having to make a single selection down here so I've halved the amount of effort that is required of them.

So that's the first sort of optimizing step I would do is to make sure I've asked as few questions as possible.

Another is fill in default responses.

After you've usually when you're working on a form you'll type in some answers and make sure the form works correctly and then as a final as one of your final steps you'll click tools, clear answers and that will clear out all of your answers so that you end up with these nice empty question mark fields for people to fill in.

But beyond that there might be one more step that you can do as well. In this form, it asks for the buyers county of residence and my office is in King County and most of my clients are in King County so I might as well just go ahead and type the word king there.

That way the form user, you know I'll save this out as a form with the word king right in there and when the form user comes along to use the form, they'll type in the name of the buyer except I made that a drop down and then they'll move down here to the county and if it's king, they don't have to type anything. They can just hit tab and move right on to the next question.

So anytime you've got an answer that is usually the case, put that in as a default and then you'll save them a little typing when they're going through it.

The third thing is to hide labels.

Very early versions of the form tool did not have this, where is it? Rose did not have this show hide command or it worked differently than it does now.

So so early users may may have never been aware of this. So this is a good thing to know for people who've been using it for a long time. Before you, save the form for use as a final step, you might wanna click show hide. What that does is it hides this whole label column on the left and if you have any grids, it hides the first row in the grid.

That's all important, information for you as a forum author but as a forum user it's just distracting really. So click bro call show hide and I'll show you what the end result looks like. Now I've got just a two column table instead of a three column table to look at and I don't have to look at that top row on the grid. It's a much cleaner look for the form user.

The next thing here is to make sure to provide enough empty slots. I'm gonna click show hide again to reveal all that stuff that just got hidden.

And what I mean there is anytime you have a list type answer like here I've got list all guarantors and there's only one slot there. That does not make it immediately apparent to the form user that they're allowed to type more than one item there. They can always read this little tag that says click add button to add an item but it's much better if you as the form author give them a head start by clicking that add button yourself a couple of times. Just visually it lets them know, oh there's I can put in several things there.

And also if they have two or three items it saves them the trouble of finding and clicking that add button themselves.

So I will always add as many slots as I think are likely to be needed in a form so that I can keep them away from having to click that add button at all. Same thing goes for grids down here where I've asked for a number of parties as the form author, I would click that add button a few times to add several, rows for them to work with. You don't want to go too overboard because when they click the refresh button it takes a little longer if there's more, more rows there. It has to do a little bit of extra processing. So don't go overboard and put way more than would ever get used. Just put in a good number so that, they'll be able to cover most all of their situations.

And then the next one here is dividers.

Dividers are a really nice feature in any questionnaire where you have lots of questions.

This is a short questionnaire but I'm just gonna pretend that it's long so that I can demonstrate how to use dividers. Let's suppose I have a whole bunch of questions related to the buyer right here at the top. I'm putting my cursor in that first buyer question buyer buyer info and then I have information about the guarantors. I only have one question here but let's pretend I have a whole bunch of them. So I put my cursor there and I add another divider. Row call divider add. This is guarantors info.

And finally let's add one more down here about rule sixteen.

I have three questions about rule sixteen.

So I'm going to add a divider.

Says rule sixteen info. Put in whatever headings you like here. You can, you have an unlimited amount of space to work with here. You could add a whole paragraph of instructions if you wanted to.

And then it might even be worthwhile to color code these. You can go up to the first section, put your cursor anywhere in the first section and say row call divider. Let's make that color orange and then here in my guarantors section I want it to be blue and I want my rule sixteen secondtion to be green.

That gives me the capability now to refer to particular sections in my instructions. I can say in the guarantors info, be sure to fill in the green section two or something like that. So those colors can be a good way to break up information for people as well.

So that's dividers.

Next one I've got here is formatting questions and including example responses.

This whole third or second column that has your questions in it along with any dividers that you've added is your space as the form author to do whatever you want. You can use any formatting you like.

Font formatting, paragraph formatting.

You could insert graphics even into there if you want. I know some people insert hyperlink, hyperlinks in their questions. If they've got external information related to the question, they can put a link to it there. I could put a link to a Wikipedia article in here if I wanted to so that when someone is reading that question, if they need more information, they could click that link and go out to an external source of information.

But there's some really common things that I do a lot. One is when I need to specify a format. Let's suppose maybe in this list of guarantors for some reason I need them to be listed last name first.

It's not gonna be anyone's natural inclination to type those names last name first so I gotta let them know that's what I want. So I'm gonna add a hard return here and type, rather than say last name first, I will always opt for an example. I think that it's more clear, but you could do it any way you like. But what I would you do is say, example, oops, example, colon, Smith, comma, John.

And then I'd make that flush right and maybe italics and maybe I'd spell it correctly.

Maybe I'd make it smaller so it's not so imposing.

I set my my explanatory information, my instructional information off and make it distinct from the question itself because I think it makes for a much more approachable form. It's not just a big block of text for me to read. It's more like well I've got a short little question here and I've got a brief little, instruction over there.

It's easy to process as a form user.

Make it next one here is make it clear when some questions can be skipped.

In this case, I've got one question here that says does rule sixteen apply?

If rule sixteen applies, I've got two more questions I need answered. If it doesn't apply, I want the forum user to just ignore these two questions. They don't have to even read those two questions.

So I'll do that usually with formatting. There's a couple things you can do. I like to add some indenting and an explanation. I'll say if yes colon, I usually make that bold, and then I will indent these two questions.

So just visually now they can see Oh, I've got one great big question here and depending on my response to it, if yes then I've got some other stuff to deal with. But if it's not yes then my eyeball is just gonna go straight past that and pick up with the next relevant question.

And the last one I've got here is directing users to grids if they need to be filled in first. Remember a few minutes ago I think Katie was the one who mentioned she likes to list the parties down below like I've done here and then up above rather than having someone type in the buyer name, they have the the user choose the buyer from a list of buyers which is derived from these party names down below. That means the form user has to fill in the bottom grid before they fill in the buyer name up here so that they'll have something to choose from.

So in that case I will add another divider up here at the very top.

Divider add and I'll have it say, important.

Fill in and I usually color the grid so that I can refer to it easy. Let's say pink. Fill in the pink table below first.

Whatever, you know, language you like there. You could even colorize this so that it draws their eye.

Let's make that, let's make it red so it stands out. Fill in the pink table below first and then down here I would use the divider color command to colorize this whole grid.

Divider color pink And so they've got a nice clear instruction right at the top that's gonna direct them into the proper order when they're filling in this form.