Form: How to make multiple search paths clear in the UI?

Question

Background info: I am working on a healthcare application for acute care. In this application you can request personal data from the national government if you met the following criteria:

1) If you have the patient's citizen service number

OR

2) If you have the patient's date of birth, gender, and surname

OR

3) If you have the patient's date of birth, gender, and address

OR

4) If you have a combination of 1), 2), 3)

Context: All this information is displayed on one screen. Unfortunately, I can't upload a screenshot, but I'll try to explain my problem:

• This screen contains a total of around 25 inputs which are all related to the patient's personal data
• All those inputs are showed at once (including the citizen service number, date of birth, gender, and address)
• You can only continue to the next screen if you have requested the personal data from the national government (A) and when all 8 required inputs are filled in (B)
• In order to request the data from the national government, you have to fill in the data of one of the search paths 1), 2), 3), 4). So, of those 8 required inputs only 5 inputs can be used to request the remaining patient data from the national government.

The problem: A lot of our end-users think that all required inputs (8) must be filled in order to request the remaining personal data from the national government. Other users do not know that there are multiple search paths as I explained before.

Question: How can I make clear that there are 3 (or 4) search paths in the UI? And how can I make clear that not all required information is needed in order to request the remaining data from the national goverment?

Answer 1

I would suggest first presenting the user with the possible search paths, with the most commonly used bucket presented first and by default:

If they were to select Personal Information, the visible fields would change:

(For address, you'd likely want to include city, state, and zip as well)

If they were to select All Fields, it would look largely like the Personal Information bucket, but with the Citizen Service Number field included.

This allows the user to focus on which fields need to be completed, and it completely removes the ones they don't need to complete.