Over the weekend Australia’s ANZ Bank went live with their first few forms built with Adobe LiveCycle ES. PDF Forms you may think? Meh says some? No no no.. check out these great Flash based forms;

https://apply2.anz.com/au/savings/onlinesaver/ [Updated]

http://apply.onedirect.com.au/savings

So what makes the forms so special and customer friendly?  Well consider the following features of the form and compare it to your last web form experience;

1. Smooth form flow – The user has control and can move back and forth between form sections as it suits them and there is no need to wait for browser refreshes etc as the content is rendered in the Adobe Flash Player.
2. Guided transitions between panes – The user is visibly guided from one section to the next
3. Rich form experience – Easy to use form with contextual based help to assist the user in filling in the form
4. Contextual based help to assist the user in filling in the form – Immediate non-evasive error reporting using the Flex validation techniques – Don’t just tell the user that they made a error, show them where and why.

What are the benefits to ANZ by using LiveCycle ES and Form Guides?

1. Easy to add additional features/offers – The forms can be maintained without developers by using LiveCycle Designer ES
2. Easy to turn into new products – Branded templates built for the new forms above can now be reused to bring new products to market quickly and easily.
3. Options to embed interactive Flash advertisements, Flash video etc – Create a great branded application process and guide customers through the experience. The form guides are based on Adobe Flex and can be extended using Adobe Flex Builder
4. Reusable template to allow form developers to concentrate on form logic and not worry about the UI, resulting in reduced development time and costs
5. Easy to white label for multi branding

But hang on.. i’m a Flex developer.. can’t I just use Flex Builder?

Well of course, and for many developers this will be the path you take, however for large organisations with many many forms, maintaining all that code can be cumbersome, and as a developer do you really want to be bothered opening up old projects just to change some wording for some business user standing over your shoulder?  No.. the trend in enterprise is to give power back to the business community. LiveCycle Designer allows you to capture the power of Flex and place it into reusable templates that business users and form designers can quickly create forms with.

This is a great start for such an innovative bank and I hear this is just the beginning for ANZ’s online status.