Best Practices

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  • 1.  Top 3 Tips and Tricks

    Posted 09-09-2021 12:20
    In the past 3+ years, I have worked very closely with ProntoForms customers on their different use cases and how they get familiar with using ProntoForms. In that time, I have learned a lot about best practices and wanted to share the top 3 that I have learned:

    1. Create a Testing FormSpace as well as a Production FormSpace
    This allows you the space to play around with new use cases or new functionality in a completely separate environment without affecting the forms your mobile users are actively using.

     2.  Always test a new form before deploying it to a larger audience
    There is nothing more frustrating than spending hours making a form only to find out no one is going to use it. Having a small test group of mobile users is key to ensuring every form you make available gets used to its complete efficiency.

    3. Make sure to include business-critical data points from the beginning 
    If you know that in 6 months your boss is going to want to know how many times a certain location has been visited, then you need to make sure you have a "location" question somewhere on your form. Anything you ever anticipate needing to report on, or create a graph for, will need its own specific question on the form in order to feed into that report.


    I'm curious though - What are the top 3 things you've learned as a best practice when it comes to working within ProntoForms? 

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    Shona Nicolle
    Manager, Customer Success
    ProntoForms
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  • 2.  RE: Top 3 Tips and Tricks

    Adopter
    Posted 09-21-2021 15:11
    Great points, Shona. Based on our experience using ProntoForms, I think these would be PrimeLine's top 3 best practices:
    1. Build a standard set of controls that will be included on every form. Ours center around the employee (username, crew foreman), location (Geo Stamp), and customer. By including a standard group of controls/questions on every form you will enable your company to have easy reporting across forms and formspaces in the future. It is most helpful if you use the same labels consistently. We started this practice before Template-Based Sections existed, but that functionality will make this best practice even easier to execute.
    2. Document your company's default preferences on the 'Settings' portion of the form builder. Do you want photos saved to device camera roll? What is your preferred data record naming expression? Maximum submission size? Documenting these standards at the beginning will make it much easier for users to navigate data and keep your developers from guessing what settings would be best. 
    3. When in doubt, create more sections. With the ability to show or hide section headers, you can create numerous sections without the user having to see every section break on their end. With sections used liberally to break down the form into logical question groups you give yourself the ability to use conditional logic to hide sets of questions that are not relevant to the user based on previous answers. We had to build some complicated conditional logic in the beginning because we did not use sections often enough. 


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    Matt Lambert
    Vice President of Operations
    PrimeLine Utility Services
    mlambert@primelineus.com
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