Collecting information with Hitaji Forms

Hitaji Forms is the fourth product in Office, and it is the one people are most often surprised to find. It is for surveys and data collection: anything where you need the same information from a number of people and would otherwise be reading it out of emails and typing it into a spreadsheet.

Typical uses are registrations, feedback after an event, an internal request that keeps arriving in different shapes, or a survey you want to send outside the organisation entirely.

The flow

Forms works in four stages, and it is worth thinking about all four before you build anything.

1. Build. Use the form builder to lay out the questions you need.
2. Share. A form has a public fill-in page, so the people completing it do not need a Hitaji account. This is what makes Forms useful for customers, parents, applicants and members of the public.
3. Collect. Submissions arrive as responses, gathered in one place instead of one inbox.
4. Read. The responses view shows what individual people answered. The insights view summarises the whole set, which is what you want once there are more replies than you can sensibly read one by one.

Design the form around the answer you need

The most common mistake is asking for everything. Every extra question lowers the number of people who finish, and gives you a field you will then have to tidy. Before adding a question, ask what you would do differently depending on the answer. If the answer is nothing, leave it out.

Finding your forms later

The Forms dashboard has a search box (Search forms...), filters for status and category, and two scope tabs: My Forms and Organisation.

That scope choice deserves the same thought as it does for documents. A form that a colleague may need to check, reopen or read the responses to belongs in the organisation, not in your personal space. Forms tend to outlive the person who set them up.

The status filter earns its place over time, once you have a mixture of forms still collecting and forms that have been closed for months.