Picture a lift maintenance company. On every visit the technicians fill in a two-copy service report: building name, address, lift number, work carried out, parts replaced, customer signature. The forms reach the office at the end of the week, someone types them into Excel one by one, and the technician gets a call about handwriting nobody can read. Management decides to go digital, and the paper form is drawn onto a tablet screen, box for box.
Three weeks later half the technicians are back on paper. There are thirty-two fields on the screen, half of them required, the building address is typed from scratch on every visit, and the app does not save in the machine room down in the basement. On paper it was possible to leave a box empty or scribble a note in the margin; the screen does not allow it.
The technicians are not the problem. A paper form is a document that has piled up over the years, and it works thanks to the tolerance of paper. It needs to be thought through again on its way to the screen.
1. For every field, ask "who reads this, and what for?"
Fields get added to paper forms but almost never removed. The box added ten years ago for an audit stays on the form after that audit is over.
Before going digital, review the form field by field and ask one question of each: who reads this information later, and what do they do with it? Fields that go onto the invoice, are reported to the customer, must be kept by law or affect the next visit stay. Fields nobody reads go.
After this pass most forms get noticeably shorter. A shorter form is a form that gets filled in.
2. Don't make the user type what the system knows
If the technician retypes the building name, the address and the lift's serial number on every visit, the software is creating more work than paper did. This information is already in the customer record.
The form should open from the work order and arrive with everything known filled in: customer, address, device, contract type, the note from the previous visit. Date and time come from the device, the person filling in the form is known from the login, and location is added automatically if permission is given.
What the user enters by hand should be only what happened on that visit. This rule alone cuts typing time considerably.
3. Let them choose instead of type
Typing on a small screen, standing up, perhaps wearing gloves, is hard. Besides, the same job written three different ways, as "door sensor changed", "sensor renewed" and "door photocell", cannot be reported on later.
Work carried out, parts replaced and fault causes should be chosen from ready lists. One-tap buttons are used for yes or no questions, the number keypad for numbers, and a search over the stock list for parts. A part with a barcode is scanned with the camera.
Free text does not disappear completely. There should be a single "note" field at the end of every form; cases that do not fit the lists are written there. If the same phrase keeps recurring in the note field, it is time to add a new option to the list.
4. Show only the questions that are needed
A paper form has a section that says "if a part was replaced, fill in below", and everyone knows to skip it. On a screen that section does not need to appear every time.
If the answer to "Was a part replaced?" is no, the part fields never open. A breakdown visit and a periodic service show different questions. This way the form the user sees can drop to ten fields or rise to twenty-five, depending on that day's job.
Required fields should be chosen with the same eye. Making every field required does not improve data quality; the user puts a full stop in the box to be able to move on. The few fields without which the job truly cannot be processed are required, and the rest stay optional.
5. Make photos and the signature part of the form
The things paper cannot do are the real gain of a digital form. A photo of the old and the new part, an image of a parcel delivered damaged or a picture of the meter reading shortens a dispute that might come up later.
The photo should be taken from inside the form and attached directly to that record. A technician shooting it on a personal phone and sending it by message means the photo cannot be found two months later.
The customer signs on the screen with a finger. The signer's name should be asked for separately; it cannot be read from the signature. Once signed, the form is locked, and if a change is needed, keeping it as a separate correction record protects the reliability of the document.
6. The form must survive interruptions and save without a connection
Work in the field gets interrupted: the phone rings, the customer asks a question, there is a trip to the van for a part. A form left halfway should open where it was left off. Everything typed is stored as a draft by itself; forgetting to press "save" should not mean lost data.
In places like machine rooms, basements, warehouses and building sites there is often no connection. The form should be saved on the device and sent by itself when the connection returns. The user should be able to see clearly which forms have been sent and which are waiting.
If these two features are postponed in the first version with "we'll add it later", they become the most common reason for going back to paper.
7. Design what happens after "send" is pressed
The value of a form appears not when it is filled in but afterwards. On paper that was typing it into Excel at the end of the week. In digital, what happens needs to be decided at the start.
A PDF copy of the signed service report goes to the customer by email. Replaced parts are deducted from stock. Billable work reaches accounting as a notification. If "follow-up visit needed" is ticked, a new work order is opened. The manager sees the weekly report without calling anyone.
Without these steps a digital form is just a photograph of the paper on a screen; the work in the office does not shrink. Shortening the form wins over the team in the field, and designing what comes after wins over the team in the office.
In short
- Ask who reads each field; remove the fields nobody reads.
- Bring known information such as customer, address, device and date already filled in.
- Use lists, buttons and barcodes instead of free text; put a single note field at the end.
- Open questions according to the answers, and keep required fields few.
- Bring photos and the signature inside the form.
- Store the draft automatically, and allow saving without a connection.
- Design the PDF, stock, invoice and work order steps that follow submission.
A good start is to try the form in the field, on a real visit, together with two people from the team. That is where you find out how unnecessary a field that looked sensible at the desk is in a stairwell.
In our custom software projects we build apps that field, warehouse and service teams use on their phones, with offline support where needed.
Our work on this: Custom Software Development
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