Mar 01, 2016

We get to a point where we start to customize our Forms within SharePoint, if that is the case I have put together some tips and tricks that can be used to help you with the designing aspect. Once you start creating your form there is a few things you have to keep in mind.

• First of all Nintex is a Web-based interaction tool and it deploys forms in an HTML format, this allows us to attach Custom CSS and JavaScript files to the form. With the attachment of these custom files we can actually degrade the performance of the form. In short consider the complexity of the attached files when developing it for Forms
• When I am designing a form there are a few goals that I always look at to achieve, these goals are the following:
  • Simplicity – Keep in mind that your users want the process of filling out a form to be as easy and as fast as possible, don’t throw to many controls on the page
  • Consistency – When your users are on a particular site and start filling out multiple forms on that site make sure that the forms are consistent to one another. For example, if the submit button is at the bottom on one form make sure it stays on the bottom on all other form
  • Aesthetics – Who does not like a little bit of “Eye Candy” when working with forms! Remember your users will most likely work with these forms multiple times and working with dull looking forms isn’t a great experience at all.
  • Positioning of Controls – For the placement of your controls it can be beneficial to the user experience if you group them together as per category. For Example, placing a border around personal details and another border around contact information.
• When we are capturing information from the end user we always need to make sure the data has been validated before we save it. This requires us to put controls in place to perform the validation for us. For this requirement I recommend putting only the necessary validations on the form itself and let the SharePoint list handle the other validations such as required fields.
• If possible reduce the amount of fields that the form uses so that it only captures the needed information that will most likely to be filled in by the users and leave out the fields that will most often be ignored.

These are some of the tips and tricks that you could use to your advantage when the requirement comes in for you to design your forms.