What is Poka Yoke

Digital forms allow you to make business processes error-free by forcing correct actions. That’s really Poka Yoke and not possible with paper forms.

What is Poka Yoke

Poka Yoke is a Japanese term and is all about preventing mistakes. It is a technique encountered in Lean management. With Poka Yoke, it becomes almost impossible to make mistakes.

With this technique, you also keep quality under control, relieve employees from repetitive actions and can take immediate action when a problem arises.

What do digital forms and Poka Yoke have to do with each other?

You probably recognize it if you work a lot with paper forms: Unclear handwriting, clerical errors, blurry terms. Annoying when you get these on your plate to process further. It takes extra time to figure out the right information.

And if you’re not careful, the wrong data is even used in follow-up steps or reports. With digital Web forms, you can make business processes error-free.

Digital forms with Poka Yoke sauce, in other words!
And really lean, meaning self-executable and without knowledge of IT language.

Pooka Yoke funcionalities in LeanForms

Required input fields

When using paper forms, users sometimes (un)consciously leave questions blank.
In this case, the recipient will spend extra time trying to retrieve that information. If he fails to do so, he may not be able to process the form because the information is missing.

A simple Poka Yoka functionality within LeanForms’ digital forms, is mandatory questioning.
This means that a user cannot submit their form until they have answered the mandatory questions.

In addition to a substantive response, this can of course be applied to adding an attachment.

Conditions at input field

An example of an input field is and input field for zip codes. This always consists of 6 characters, no more but also no less.

Noting a date can be done in many ways. However, digital forms can be easily equipped with calendar fields where the date is easily chosen by clicking on your choice.

When collecting numbers within an organization, you can have the number of decimals set mandatory but also, for example, the minimum and maximum values. This way you avoid a lot of errors and the quality of your data increases enormously.

So digital forms with ‘Poka Yoke’ fields really make your business process run better.

Deployment of role menus

This is another very simple way to design digital forms in a more user-friendly way, as well as increase the quality of information.

With role menus in your digital form, you ensure that the information is standardized. This makes it much easier to analyze your data later.

Don’t make the role menu too extensive, a good guideline for the number of items is 8. With very long role menus, users lose track of what is going on. It is better to work with conditional role menus. These are role menus whose contents depend on an answer to a previous question. Users are then as it were guided through the form.

This may sound complicated, but is very simple to implement within LeanForms.

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