This page details the basics of Form Design:
- Important notes about changing your forms
- The form designer screen
- Creating/editing form sections
- Copying a section from another form in your library
- What do [[[ and ]]] mean?
- Creating/editing questions on your form
- Formatting the question text
- Saving your form
Please also read Building and editing review form templates (advanced) for further Form Design features you may be interested in.
Important notes about changing forms
To edit your forms, or add new ones, head to Administration Centre > Form design. You'll see a list of your forms there. Click one to edit it.
Any changes you make will be reflected immediately in any reviews using the form in the future, now and the past. Even closed reviews will be affected by changes you make to the form that those reviews used.
So, when editing a form, you have the choice to save it as a new form or to save over the existing form. How do you decide?
You're safe to overwrite the existing form in the following scenarios:
- You haven't launched Appraisd yet, or no-one is already using this form for their review
- You're just making slight adjustments to the spelling or wording of competencies.
- You're just adding new questions and sections
- You're just re-ordering questions and sections
- You're changing questions to be Rating + Text questions from just Text questions
Do not overwrite the existing form in any of the following scenarios. Instead, save your changes as a new form.
- You're making meaningful changes to the text, eg changing "Teamwork" to "Leadership". This would cause old review reports to change their meaning too.
- You're removing questions or sections.
- If you want to create a variation for a different group of people in your organization.
Form designer screen
The sections in your form are shown on the left, with the individual questions in that section shown on the right.
Click on any section on the left to show the questions within it.
Creating/editing form sections
On the left you'll see the sections in your form:
- Click on a section title to edit the title. Don't worry about the subtitle text, this isn't visible anywhere except here in Form Design.
- Click on the surrounding area to load the section's questions in the right hand panel.
- If you hover your cursor over a section, additional options will appear:
- The trash can button will delete this section from your form.
- You can drag this section up and down using the up-down arrow button.
- The two sheets of paper icon will copy the section to the bottom of the form if you want to duplicate it and then you can drag it into place.
Copying a section from another form in your library
If you're creating several variations of a form, you may find you want to grab a section from another form and bring it into the one you're editing. Do this as follows:
- Click Add a new section here
- You'll see the section selector popup:
- Use the drop down box to select the form you want to copy a section from.
- Once you do this, the list of sections in the that form will appear. Click Add next to any section you wish to add it to your new form.
- Click Ok to dismiss this window. The new section has been added and you can now save your new form.
What do [[[ and ]]] mean?
These are used to translate your form into different languages. If you're not going to use Appraisd in any other language, you can safely remove the [[[ and ]]] symbols, i.e. replace [[[Competencies]]] with Competencies.
Creating/editing questions on your form
The drop-down menu enables you to choose which type of section you want, eg. a text box and rating, or a rating only, or an overview of objectives. See below for more details on these options.
Your forms can be a mixture of any question type you like. Each question in a section has a 'type' which is one of the following. Some are obvious questions, others are more like placeholders for functionality that may or may not be available to the user:
There are also summary questions that appear at the bottom of the page in the grey section. These are used by the line manager to make an overall comment on the review discussion and to set final ratings.
For each question, you can define the following:
- Title - click the title to edit it.
- Additional notes - click them to edit the text. You can use this to add behavioural competencies and other instructions to the reviewee and line manager.
- Question type - select the question type such as rating only, rating + text, text-only from a drop-down menu above the question.
- Objective type - you can pull in the reviewee's objectives and PDPs into their review by selecting objective question types.
- Custom rating scale - you can customise your rating scale in Configuration >Forms which will then pull through into your forms. You can also edit the rating scale on the form directly if you want to use a specific one for an individual question.
- Use the duplicate button to create a new copy of a question you've already typed in.
- You can also use the trash can button to deactivate a question or the up-down arrow button to reorder questions.
Formatting the question text
You'll need to use HTML to add bold/underline/italic text:
<b>This is bold text</b>
<u>This is underlined text</u>
<i>This is italic text</i>
You can also use HTML to include bulletpoint or numbered lists:
<ul>
<li>Bullet text</li>
<li>Bullet text</li>
<li>Bullet text</li>
</ul>
<ol>
<li>1. Text</li>
<li>2. Text</li>
<li>3. Text</li>
</ol>
Saving your form
At the bottom of the page are the options to save your form.
Click Save this form to overwrite the same form. You can also rename a form by changing the name and clicking Save this form.
If you decide to save this as a new form, type in a new name for it in the box. You'll create a new form that can be used in subsequent reviews.
If you click Discard changes, you'll return to the form list and any changes you've made to this form will not be saved.
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