Ten Commandments for Effective Document Automation
These are the two most important rules for effective for document assembly and automation
I.
Optimize Each Question to Maximize Benefits
When creating forms for ourselves or for others we go to great lengths to reduce the total number of Questions to the absolute minimum while editing each to maximize clarity with minimal text. We want anyone in the office to understand exactly how to answer a Question, so no ambiguities, no jargon need apply. We frequently add a direction to a Question, not for the program, it doesn’t need them, but for the human’s understanding and confidence. For instance, the program can deal with a date supplied in almost any format but humans dither. Should I enter xx/xx/xx or month date, year, or something else? Guidance such as “Format: mm/dd/yyyy” right-justified in italics and smaller prevents confusion and concern and dithering.
And that prevents errors.
A subset: Minimize the Number of Questions
Almost daily we see construction along the lines of “How many children do you have?” ”What are their names?” “Which are boys?” ”Which are girls?” “How old is each?” We see that as five times to make an error while providing stale information. An even more common, and dangerous, example occurs in documents calling for multiple roles for the same party, asset, or attribute. While wills and trusts provide the most common examples, others happen in construction, communication, real estate, and risk management documents.
In short, make each Question do as much work as possible, leverage them to the hilt.
II.
Recognize the Importance of Foundational Forms
The first few forms in a firm’s library are foundational. They determine the boundaries of all the forms to come and deserve serious thought about their construction. While we now have customers with thousands of forms that absolutely have to have structural commonality, even firms with just a handful will appreciate when the Label “FName” doesn’t compete with “FirstName” and “First_Name” and all the other possibilties spread among a dozen Forms. Users of Doxserá’s Sets feature, where the program automatically creates multiple documents simultaneously, will enjoy the process much more if all the Fields and Lists actually work!
Of course, they’ll probably know that Dox’s Check Form tool can be used to test for commonality.
