What to change
Ask your supplier to make common characters easy to enter while preserving every format the practice accepts for names, numbers and references.
A worked example
Illustrative example
The email field makes the at-sign easy to reach, while the telephone field still permits the plus sign needed for an accepted international number.
Why this matters to your practice
A helpful phone keyboard brings common characters within easy reach. An email field benefits from an accessible at-sign, while a telephone field may need a plus sign as well as digits. Ask your supplier to choose the keyboard around the answers your practice accepts. A reference made mostly of numbers is not necessarily a quantity: leading zeros or letters may matter. Test typing and pasting realistic fictional examples so convenience does not quietly change the information supplied.
A practical review example
A telephone field may offer a convenient number pad but make an international plus sign inaccessible. A reference that looks numeric may still need a leading zero or letter. Give your supplier fictional examples of the formats reception can use and ask them to type and paste each on a real phone. Review the received values as well as the screen. Helpful keyboard choices should reduce effort without changing the meaning of an answer or silently applying unwanted capitalisation to an identifier.
How to check the result
Accept when keyboard choices reduce effort and every accepted format remains enterable and editable on the supported devices.
A mistake to avoid
Selecting a numeric field merely because most values contain digits can remove leading zeros or forbid meaningful non-numeric characters.
Turn reading into a next step
Your action checklist
Work through these checks with your team or supplier. Tick the ones you have resolved and leave unknowns open.
Record what you know, what is still missing and the answer you need from your team or supplier.
Use project decisions only, without personal, patient or confidential details. Entries stay in this page and are not submitted to Kay & Co. Copy or download before leaving; this page does not save your notes.
Further reading
These sources provide background for the topic. The practice examples and checklist are illustrative planning suggestions from Kay & Co.
Related guides
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