Context

Forms are an integral part of the Commenda's product. All the services, filings and workflows need to collect information in various capacities from the user. Almost every flow has a form input in it.

Data collection being the backbone of the product, needs to be efficient, cohesive and delightful for the user.

Target users for Agent App

These people primarily use the Commenda's enterprise app to look at their ongoing services and provide data if needed for any service/filing/workflow.

They provide us information about their entities, which in most cases is quite a long massive multi-step form to complete.

1. Form modules (the base layer)

The system I created for scalable form modules was simple: there will be a base form block component as the container. This container will have different variants for the form.

This will help us scaling the forms in future workflows and services.

2. Form composition layer

Commenda has its own form builder to create and use forms. Even though it is quite scalable to create and ship forms without any engineering help, but creating forms from scratch every time is a tedious task for the ops team.

I identified common data patterns and converted them into reusable modules, for example:

• Company Information
• Directors / Shareholders
• Registered Address
• Tax Identifiers
• Financial Details etc.

For data integration, Commenda has a data layer called CommendaOS. CommendaOS ensures that every user's data is stored centrally at one place so that finding relevant information is easy and users don't have to enter the same information again and again at different places.

Now these pre built modules were directly integrated with CommendaOS which made it easier to store data making these modules truly reusable.

And then, we hit a recursion problem

Most of our forms had one thing in common: Nested Forms.

This meant that we needed similar kind of repeated information, for example, filling a spreadsheet with employee information; the type of information (columns) remain constant, you just keep adding more rows to it with different details about each employee.

This was a constant problem to us because in forms like incorporation, users needed to add director/shareholder information. There can be multiple directors and shareholders to an entity.

Then on top of that, there can be two different types of shareholders: individual & corporate. In some cases, information about corporate shareholder of a corporate shareholder or individual shareholder of a corporate shareholder is also needed.

We introduced bottom sheets instead of modals. Bottom sheets ensured that there is enough space to accommodate variable sizes of nested forms. The bottom sheet form will behave the same as the original full page form. It will replicate the same UI in case of steps.

3. Experience layer (addressing the user pain points)

After we had set up a strong and scalable foundation for creating and shipping forms, I started thinking about how to make the experience better for the users' pain points.

And i realized, a lot of it can just be solved through better copy, right content and guidance to the users at right places. So, I went ahead to talk to the ops team and CSMs to identify the major hotspots where users are usually stuck.

I also spent some time watching mixpanel sessions of users filling forms in various kinds of services/workflows.

This helped me gather some metrics like:

• Surface areas with high error rates
• Step-wise drop-off rate
• Save & resume rate; % of users who leave and come back

These metrics were generally high for incorporation forms, sales tax onboarding steps and transfer pricing onboarding steps.

I introduced the guidance badges to contain all the information about a certain input and why it is needed.

We first tried using info/help icons in place of the badges and after talking to a few users we realized, users usually skip those as they think it might not be helpful.

Catering to the upsell opportunities

There was a huge gap in the upsell space in our product. There were so many services that Commenda offered but the users weren't aware. They ended up buying those either outside the product or reaching out to the support separately to ask about this.

Due to this, we ended up losing a lot of opportunities to provide a product suite experience to our existing customers. I catered to this but thoughtfully placing upsell cards wherever required.

Making the users prepared

For longer forms with multiple steps in it, usually users take time to fill it because they are not prepared. We decided to have a step 0 for the pre-requisites. This would inform the users about what type of information will be asked in this form and how they can be prepared beforehand with the information/documents.