A long form will be abandoned
Barn staff record while standing, often with one hand. That changed almost every design decision we made about the form.
Published . Written by Bunga
When we built Ternakpark and Sobaternak, we started from the wrong assumption: that the problem was incomplete data. So we designed a form that captured everything.
That assumption collapsed the moment we looked at where it would actually be used. Barn staff record while standing, often with one hand, and almost never at a desk. A form that captures everything takes time, and that time does not exist.
What happens next is the same in any system: people write on paper first and enter it later. Once that happens, the app has already lost. Two jobs for one piece of data, and the data entered later is always poorer than the data recorded on the spot.
So we reversed the question. Not "what data do we need" but "how long is this person willing to stop". Only then did we decide how much fits.
The rest we moved: some filled in automatically, some asked only when relevant, some deleted because it turned out no report ever used it.
What we learned: complete data does not come from a complete form, it comes from a form people actually fill in. A field left empty over and over is not a discipline problem, it is a design problem.