Create your form in JotForm
Some quick tips to help you get the most out of JotForm's capabilities. This article will make some suggestions to help you create your first forms
Recommended form elements to take advantage of:
JotForm is a very flexible tool for creating customisable HTML forms that are available online. They provide you with a number of specialised form fields. In particular, we would encourage you to advantage of the following fields.
Basic form fields:
- Email - provides email validation to make sure your clients provide a real email address
- Phone - provides a masked input to help them enter a phone number
- When mapping a phone number to the number in AppointmentGuru, AppointmentGuru will assume the local country code for your account (e.g.: +27)
- Date Picker - make sure to check the date format, and potentially set a default date (e.g.: you can set the default to today)
- Page break - If you have long forms, this is a great way to break them into sections so that they are less intimidating for the client. For example, you might have a section for consent, contact information, medical aid information etc.
Advanced form fields:
Fill in the blank
This is really useful for consent forms. It allows you to capture information such as:
I __, the undersigned with ID number __ agree to the terms and conditions as laid out above
Signature
This provides a field where the client can sign their signature using their finger on their device - again, this is great for consent forms.
Tips
- If you are capturing the date separately, turn off "show timestamp on PDF" for the signature field
Quick tips and tricks
Don't use the full name field
Rather use individual short text fields for first name and last name. This will be easier to map to your profile in AppointmentGuru.
Creating an single opt-in/out option.
Often, you will want to provide a checkbox with a single option. For example, if the client needs to tick a box to accept terms and conditions.
The way to do this is to use a Multiple Choice field. Remove all choices except 1 (you may also want to remove the "question" - e.g., where it says "type question here". The result is that you have a single field for them to opt-in or out. If it is required that they select this box (as would be the case when accepting terms and conditions), you can make it required.
Conditional formatting
You can show or hide fields, or set the value of one field based on the value of another field.
Some times you might want to use this:
- if your forms have repetitive fields (like name, phone number or email) - for the client's convenience, you can fill these out throughout the form where they repeat.
- When capturing medical aid information, you can have a tickbox (e.g.: "patient is dependant") which will only show relevant fields if ticked
You can have a tick box for if the person filling out the form is the parent or guardian and show/hide various fields accordingly
You can read more about conditional form fields in the JotForm Documentation