Improving Workflow Compliance and User Experience with Fillable PDFs

In this case study, Vicki Farmer, Senior Web Developer at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration describes how Fillable PDFs has helped her agency move away from overly-complex proprietary PDFs and improved compliance with complex workflows.

The Problem

“The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is a US government scientific research lab dedicated to better understanding the natural world and monitoring global weather and climate with partners around the world. From daily weather forecasts, severe  severe storm warnings, and climate monitoring to fisheries management, coastal restoration, and supporting marine commerce, the NOAA has to deal with a huge range of workflows in a variety of disciplines.

Many of these workflows have a lot of agency-specific PDFs associated with them, and they are NOT user friendly! The print is tiny, and a lot of the times the user only needs to enter information in a small subset of the fields in any given form. There had to be a better way of handling the large amounts of information being transferred through these PDFs.”

The Solution

“I wanted to build forms that were easier to interact with and only ask for the required information for a given workflow. These form submissions would then need to be turned into very specific (non-generic) PDFs with the filled-in information.

Fillable PDFs was the ideal solution. By harnessing the power of Gravity Forms, Fillable PDFs lets you create complex, custom forms with a wide range of the fields necessary for the workflows we were handling and conditional logic, so that only the relevant fields are shown – and then turn them into great looking PDFs at the touch of a button!”

Delivering a Great User Experience

“Since using Fillable PDFs, we get a lot better compliance with workflows and mandated processes; it really makes a significant difference to our users when the tools are so easy and pleasant to use. Lots of our users have commented on just how much better we’ve made these tasks, so that they no longer dread having to deal with them!”

Fillable PDFs is the number one choice for Vicki and so many other web developers looking to improve the usability of their forms because of its dynamic and easy-to-use feature set:

• Easy set up with PDFs automatically generated in a few steps
• Create Gravity Forms from existing PDFs using the time-saving Form Importer
• Send Generated PDFs with existing Form Notifications, making data management more straightforward
• Populate PDF Fields from almost anywhere including Nested Form fields and Gravity Forms Image Choices
• Privacy Protection with all generated PDFs stored locally on your own site.

If you want to create the best possible experience for your users, why not try Fillable PDFs today?