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Forms expert Caroline Jarrett joins Gerry to talk about why the rush to AI is colliding with something most organisations haven't fixed - their own data. A conversation about errors, forms, and the unglamorous work that actually moves the dial.
Three Key TakeawaysWell, 6 in this episode, as Caroline is bloody amazing. Pick the three that land hardest for you :-)
Forms are the only compulsory part of a service. Everything else in user experience is the mountain - forms are the tiny red peaks poking up above it. Get them wrong and the rest of your design doesn't matter.
AI doesn't fix bad data - it propagates it faster. Before any organisation hands work over to a model, the honest question isn't "how do we use AI" but "do we even know how bad our data already is?"
Most teams can't tell you their error rate. E-commerce calls it conversion. Government barely tracks it at all. If you can't see where people are dropping out - or being quietly forced into wrong answers - you can't design your way out of it.
Forms don't just collect data, they shape behaviour. Every time a website rejects an apostrophe in O'Connor, or hides "other" as an option, it's forcing people to lie - and then treating that lie as truth.
You don't have to be a statistician to find errors. Graph the data. Spikes, gaps and outliers will tell you where the wrong question is hiding faster than any spreadsheet ever will.
The designer's job is to notice what everyone else has normalised — the broken form field, the impossible question, the dataset everyone distrusts but nobody fixes.
https://www.effortmark.co.uk/
uk.linkedin.com/in/carolinejarrett
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