GOV.UK Forms
“Making all forms on GOV.UK accessible, easy to use and quick to process”
Image credit: GOV.UK Forms
The GOV.UK Forms project is meeting the need for departments to be able to create accessible digital forms for citizens, to interact with the government more effectively at their time of need. With the overall goal of reducing inaccessible document based forms on the GOV.UK website.
We have been designing a form building tool that is usable for civil servants with little or no digital specialist knowledge. The form tool has to be accessible and help form creators create accessible forms, while improving the collection of information from people filling in the forms compared with the current information quality they currently receive in both offline paper and document based forms and plain text emails.
By working to keep the tool text based, I have been able to help the team to make the service fully accessible to form creators as well.
During my time working on Forms, I have helped design the original iteration of the platform, building HTML prototypes using the GOV.UK Prototype Kit, to test the platform concept. I then contributed to the design of the overall form creation journey and interactions for new priority features to help us adapt the platform to bring more forms onboard. Some of the features I have worked on to date include:
- question routing - this allows form creators to control the journey a form filler will see depending on answers given so that form fillers only answer the questions that are relevant to them
- payment links - this allows form fillers to pay a fee using a GOV.UK Pay link (another GOV.UK service) so that they can complete their whole task in a single journey
- confirmation emails - this gives form fillers the option to receive a “receipt” of their submission as they often need proof or reassurance that the task was completed
In testing we have seen and heard how easy and quick it is to create and edit new forms, while the people processing the information from real people have praised the validated and clear data helping them process submissions more effectively and efficiently saving real time of staff and money for the government.