Our team’s strategy
Written by Harry Vos
Our CEO, Tom Read, mentioned tackling the long tail of PDF forms in the Government Digital Service (GDS) strategy for 2021-2024. It’s been a few months since our last sprint update. Building on our GDS strategy, we want to share an early version of our strategy with the cross-government form-building community. To reach people outside the community, we’re also aiming to post on the GDS Blog next month.
As we learn more, we expect our team’s strategy to change. We’ll keep the community updated when this happens.
What our team has been up to
When we started looking at how government collects information from users, we said we wouldn’t be working on this beyond March 2021 unless we found unmet user needs and we got funding. In short, we found both.
Our team has grown slightly. There’s three of us now:
- David Biddle, Frontend developer
- Harry Vos, Senior product manager
- Moyo Kolawole, Senior user researcher
We’re assembling a team and establishing partnerships to help start our alpha phase at some point next quarter. Until then, we aim to do some more research before we wrap up our discovery phase.
Our vision
Every form on GOV.UK will be accessible, easy to use and quick to process.
Why now
The GDS strategy has set the ambition for tackling the long tail of forms. Around 96% of services on GOV.UK solely use PDF or other document-based forms to collect information. The number of these forms is growing by ~6% every year. They are usually inaccessible, hard to use and, on average, 8 minutes slower to process compared to online forms. These forms are discriminatory — since the 2018 accessibility regulations, departments have been facing challenges that may lead to litigation.
How we’re trying to get there
We want to help operations teams that run lower volume, public-facing services with fewer than 10,000 transactions per year to quickly create online forms using a common form-building platform for government. These would complement PDF forms for users who prefer them. As lower volume services can’t afford the costs or lead times of current solutions, we need to make it cheaper and quicker. To reduce the risk of litigation, we are also exploring policy changes for publishing and using PDF forms on GOV.UK.
Value we aim to provide to our intended users
For the primary users in operations and policy teams running services with fewer than 10,000 transactions per year, we aim to reduce the time they spend contacting people about incomplete forms and helping those that get stuck. For secondary users in departments’ digital assurance and content design teams, we aim to give visibility of upcoming forms so they can prioritise their time to maximise impact. For tertiary users of the actual services, we aim to provide more accessible and easier to use forms.
How we’ll measure success
Accessibility
- change in percentage of attachments on form pages on GOV.UK which have a complementary accessible online form
Ease of use and design capability
- average completion rate of online forms that were designed by people outside the digital, data and technology profession
Processing time
- PDF form downloads as a percentage of overall form transactions (PDF form downloads + online form transactions)