A form becomes kinder when the person designing it imagines filling it out while worried.

Most forms are designed by someone calm, at a desk, with the whole system in their head. They are filled in by people who are ill, late, grieving, out of money, or holding a child. A question that reads as neutral in the first condition can be impossible in the second, and the gap between the two is where most of the cruelty in paperwork lives.

If you make anything people have to complete, try it once while imagining the hardest day someone might bring to it. Shorten what you can, explain what you cannot, and say plainly what happens next. Clarity is a form of mercy here.