Electronic Waiver Suggestion
Hi Andy,
Since you sent out the RGP survey a bit ago (thanks by the way), I've been mulling over the question of additions to RGP that would be helpful.
One idea, that I didn't include in the survey, was an option to help standardize States for the electronic waiver. With a text box, we get all sorts of variations on a state - Texas, TX, tx, texas, TX-Texas, TX-texas, Texsus, etc. And Texas is only 5 letters long ...
It would be great to have a drop down option for states which would hopefully result in less variety. The same goes for the country text box.
Another option would be a form that asks for zip code first and then auto populates city and state based on the zip (i've seen these popping up more and more online). Not sure it's an option, but I thought I'd throw it out there.
Best,
Will
Comments
Hi Will,
Thanks for the feedback. As useful as these ideas sound, they are not without problems.
The first significant issue is that waivers are legal documents. And completing form elements for people causes possible wrinkles with the validity of the document. For instance, if the city gets populated wrong (because of errors in the zip database).... and the customer doesn't notice, it creates a doubt in the entire validity of the signing process.
We actually tried the zipcode lookup at Smartwaiver and it was fraught with problems. Regardless of the database used, there are sometimes errors in the data. Additionally, people are not accustomed to entering their zipcode first and it caused "flow" problems with people completing the waivers. Ultimately, we pulled the zipcode feature from SW.
The country/state has it's own issues. In order to populate the states based on country, you need to have the country input box come first. We observed this field ordering also caused some "flow" problems for people accustomed to banging through their address. Ultimately it was decided the country had to come after the state/zip. And the only way this is then useful is if the country has a default (to the United States for US gyms, for example).
Smartwaiver does have a Country box BELOW the State drop box. But the country has default value selected which allows the state a to have a pick list. This is definitely awkward for people from other countries as the need to go DOWN to the Country, unselect the default, and then back up to the State (for Canada, for example).
This all sounds confusing, but the bottom line is 1) zipcode lookup is dangerous and 2) state picklist can be done, but it creates issues for people with other countries and the risk of people leaving the default of the U.S.
You can see how this works at the Smartwaiver demo waiver (lower, left corner) of https://www.smartwaiver.com .
It's all a tradeoff :)
Ha! This is amazing, thanks for the thorough response. I really appreciate how in depth you've looked into all the little elements of making RGP a kick ass system.
-Will
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