Mobile Forms and Applications Blog

Three reasons why mobile form interfaces make poor final reports

If you use mobile forms for data collection and store those forms individually, you may discover that what you’re storing is not ideal for either printing or viewing on a desktop screen.

1 Your little smartphone interface will look tall and skinny when viewed on a PC or printed on paper. (Or it may appear zoomed in as an enormous font size.) Either way the small screen does not translate well to the large world.

2 A good interface is not a good report format. Report layouts should be optimized reading, not touching, and you don’t want your finished report filled with visible software input controls – dropdown arrows, submit buttons, camera controls, date pickers, etc.

3 The logical order and wording for collecting data often doesn’t match the logical order and wording for presenting that data. Let’s use the example of a safety inspection form to illustrate this point.

Safety Inspection Form Example

Suppose you’re and inspector using a mobile safety inspection form. A logical order for your work is to follow a detailed checklist to make sure you don’t forget anything, then note any problems you find. The checklist belongs front and center on your interface, and should include all necessary descriptive language.

Now consider the person who’s going to consume the results of your inspection. Whether it’s a homeowner or  a corporate compliance officer, the reader of the inspection report is primarily  interested in your findings, not your checklist. The findings belong front and center, and the checklist can be downplayed and displayed in a terse format.

The following screenshots illustrate an inspection form with an interface optimized for data  input and a report format optimized for consumption.