Contact forms are essential to tracking data on your clients. Information that goes into this form will help you categorize and segment them for reporting later. 

When creating a strategy for how to collect data at the contact level, you will need to think about categorizing your data in 3 different ways: 

Contact Type - First decide, what are the different categories of people you need to be tracking?  Student, Client, Donor, Youth, Volunteer, etc. and whether or not they are individuals or groups. The type you choose will allow you to search easily for people in the system.   Data collection fields you add to these forms should be unique for each.  For example, you wouldn't track "student ID" for someone categorized as a Donor. 

Common Fields - This form is going to show up for all your different contact types and should contain data fields that are the same for all contact types.   Examples of this are Date of Birth, Address, Gender, etc.

Navigate to Forms on the left hand column.  From there you will see tabs to create Activity forms, Assessment forms, and Contact forms.  Select Contact.  

From there you click the + Create a new contact type button.  Decide if it's a person or group, and give it a name.  Then press the blue Create button. Your new contact type will appear in the grid below.  
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To create fields to put in that contact type's form, under "Actions" select Customize.  You will be brought to the form builder, where you can begin to build your form. 

To create a common fields form, simply navigate to the contact type grid where it says Common fields, and select Customize.  You will be taken to the Form Builder, where you can select fields to put on your form. 

See how you can set up the contact forms to show critical information on a contact's sidebar.