In our enterprise management software we use forms to record document like customers, invoices, sales order, tasks, products, etc. We wanted forms to look like their hard paper version.
Below is an example of a quotation.
When you click on the edit button, each field becomes editable so that the page switches to a form with the same structure.
Some forms, like product forms, have a lot of fields so we structure the form by grouping fields together, which looks quite complex.
I think our current approach is not bad but it does not respect several UX patterns:
- avoid multi-columns in forms
- put labels on the top of each field and, if we put the label on the left of the field, it should be right aligned, near the input field.
I would like to know if there is a better idea to structure such complex forms?