We all know it’s hard to dive into a large form when you may not have the details you need. How many times have you reloaded a form and sifted through the pages until it’s obvious where you need to make changes? One way to make this process easier for respondents is through dashboard forms.
Creating Dashboards
By creating dashboard forms with FormAssembly, you can take a long, painful process and turn it into a flexible and comfortable experience. What exactly is a dashboard form? It’s a series of forms combined through links and other formatting to create a streamlined portal for the user. With forms organized in this way, respondents can keep tabs on where they are in completing a process. Dashboard forms help respondents avoid becoming overwhelmed or missing key steps.
Using the Prefill Connector
Adopting the dashboard format alongside the Salesforce Prefill Connector gives respondents a checklist to work through, allowing them to know what has been completed and what steps are left. It can also help create a feeling of accomplishment, by providing a checklist countdown to completion.
Read on for two great dashboard examples that you can borrow from as you create your own dashboard forms.
FormAssembly Internal Use Case
Angel Speagle, Knowledge Coordinator, has used this method to create at least one training dashboard per department to help employees get started in their new roles at FormAssembly.
Within each new hire’s training record in Salesforce, where all training module submissions are pushed, a checkbox representing completion of each module is queried by the form’s Salesforce Prefill Connector. If this box is checked, the connector then marks a corresponding checkbox on the form upon loading.
Angel has also created a phased process by conditionally triggering additional sections with the completion of a prerequisite, as needed for the various trainings.
Angel’s use of the FormAssembly dashboard form design helps each trainee flow through several forms, covering a variety of topics, to get started on the right foot.
Baltimore Corps
Billy Daly is the Director of Data, Technology, and Evaluation at Baltimore Corps, an organization dedicated to social innovation. Billy takes the dashboard form process to new creative levels through complex application workflows.
Individuals applying to the organization’s Fellowship Program can move through the application process at their own speed. The dashboard portal provides each applicant the flexibility to choose the order of the application steps as they go along.
By tying each form, or step, of the application process to activities in Salesforce, it’s easy to tell which steps are incomplete when viewing the dashboard. Within the Batimore Corps application processes, the dashboard sections labeled Completed or To Do are prefilled into repeated sections, depending on the status of the task. All tasks with the status Not Started are placed in the To Do section.
When all of the steps of the application have been completed (meaning the form has been submitted in totality), each step is available for review by using the Prefill Connector.
Billy first created this dashboard form setup in 2016. It has powered 3 or more concurrent application processes at any given time with very little editing, as all forms are edited individually. Each application record defines which forms are needed for completion of the application. For instance, a volunteer may not need all the same steps as an applicant to the Fellowship Program.
When describing the use case, Billy noted that sharing the individual forms between processes has saved significant time for Baltimore Corps. If the contact information form for one process needs an update, most likely all the other applications would too. Instead of doing an update to all processes, staff can use the same contact information form for all applications! Baltimore Corps has kept that trend going with forms used in other application processes, such as the resume and skills section updates.
Each application process has its own list of to-do forms, and these forms are all shared between different process. With such complexity, how do they know what forms are needed for each task?
The connector from the sign up form creates a contact, an application, and separate tasks—one for each form or step in the process—per applicant. The details of each form, such as the subject, form location, and the description, are pulled into repeating fields from the tasks associated with the contact and application process.
Billy also uses prefilled hyperlinks and clickable text to allow people to choose what section they want to work on next and be directed there through the link. This helps make the link customizable with the contact ID or another identifying piece of information and more helpful text depending on the status of the task.
If you enjoyed these dashboard use cases, why not try creating your own dashboards? Trialing FormAssembly is free!
