We’ve all had to fill out those long, dreary forms asking us loads of unnecessary questions. As we learned in Forms 101, the first rule of form building is asking your respondent only what is absolutely necessary. The more relevant and intuitive the form, the more likely it is to get filled out. With conditional rules, Zoho Forms does just that. You can control the overall flow of the form by configuring rules to display the next field to be filled in, based on the response in the previous field. For example, let’s take an Order Form.

Normally, we’d have two separate fields for the Billing Address and the Shipping Address. But what if the customer wants to use the same address for both billing and shipping? In that case, having them fill two fields is redundant. Here we can add a rule to make the form simpler.

We add a rule with the condition that will show the Billing Address field only if the answer to ‘Billing Address same as Shipping Address?’ is Yes.

So, a customer ordering a gift can enter the address of the recipient in the Shipping Address field and their own address in the Billing Address field.

Now, suppose a customer wants to gift wrap their order, we have a provision that allows them to choose the kind of wrapping paper they want. This is easily done by displaying the wrapping papers available using the Image Choice field.

While building the order form, we include a Decision Box field for the statement ‘This is a gift’. Since only the customers who are placing their order as a gift will want to choose a wrapping paper, we can add another rule to improve the customer’s form filling experience.

Under Rules, we can set up a rule such that, if ‘This is a gift’ is True then show Choose your wrapping paper.

Now, only when a customer says that the order is a gift, will they be given the option to pick out their wrapping paper. Otherwise, that field is not shown to them.

These are some of the ways in which you can use rules to manipulate the flow of your forms, making it more intuitive and easy to fill. Found any other creative ways to use rules? Let us know in the comments below.

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