Mobile forms improve the efficiency and productivity of your field staff. Below are four ways you can use mobile form apps to enhance the performance of your company and save time.
1. Condense Lengthy Forms into Easily Navigable Pages
Scrolling through lengthy forms involves checking and processing relevant data and frequently updating the results, which slows down the form’s performance. To improve performance, a mobile form app breaks lengthy forms into separate pages that feature certain conditions and calculations. The result is improved performance and enhanced data safety.
2. Restrict Access to Some Fields
It is not safe to provide wide-open access to every one person who uses a mobile form. If this were to happen, it means someone can see and edit the content of the forms, risking the loss of crucial data should an unauthorized person tamper with it. For instance, if you provide wildcard access, a client may edit the price field with a viewing to entering a price they are most comfortable with. Besides, when you make all form fields editable, their performance becomes sluggish.
To counter this potential data risk, use the “Restrict Data On” function to allow only internal wide-open access to sensitive form fields. The sensitive fields can be frozen and only allow ‘view only’ access to external users such as clients. When clients see that a field is frozen, they will skip that particular field and save themselves a lot of time. The device will also process and search data faster since the search query will ignore unnecessary data.
3. Fewer Rows in Your Tables
Too many rows may impede the performance of your system. For instance, let’s say you have a 5-column table with maximum repeats set at 20 rows. Your form will multiply 5 by 20 and, therefore, treat them as though they were 100 questions, whether a row is empty or not. While you may want to have reserve rows for data entry, you have to be realistic and avoid leaving too many rows. Fewer rows mean increased performance.
4. Reduce Size and Image Scale Wherever Possible
Most of the pictures you take using a phone, tablet or a camera are too large. While high-res images may be required in some instances, mobile applications do not need large images. They tend to slow the system. The good news is that you can adjust your mobile app settings to allow scaled down images. This results in a dramatic size reduction of your forms and makes it easy and faster to share them with other users such as the dispatcher, customers, headquarters, etc.
5. Faster Completion of Forms
Completing a mobile form is as easy as typing away. Since users only enter data into allowed fields, they are able to complete filling the mobile forms more quickly.
6. Easy-to-Find Forms
Mobile form apps allow perfect record keeping. In one glance at the recent activity tab, users can quickly identify any recently edited form. It is also possible to view forms by status using the sort and filter options.
7. Quickly Share Forms
Unlike the old school form sharing method that utilized scanning, faxing or hand delivery, with a mobile form app, sharing a form is as easy as a tap. There are options that allow you to share forms and streamline their use.
8. Track Changes and History
You don’t have to rummage through batches of notes and emails to find specific information such as recent edits. The mobile form app will furnish you with these details within seconds. It is possible to view quickly information about tags, last modified, history, and other details.
The ability to process data with lightning speeds and needlepoint precision makes the mobile form app an indispensable tool for efficient field operations.
