MoJ Forms cross-government update 3 - September 2021
Written by Claire Bowman
Hello, I’m Claire, and I’m filling in for Irina while she’s on maternity leave.
A lot has happened since our last update. We are now 5 months into our private beta and have a growing number of teams using the platform. A few of those have launched forms to users while others have been keen to try it out and consider it for future requirements.
Enabling more complex forms
The majority of teams we speak to are waiting on our next big release, which is branching. This is our name for the ability to show different questions to users based on their previous answers.
We undertook a lot of detailed analysis to arrive at our initial scope. We believe that most of our users need to be able to base branching decisions on radio and checkbox questions, so for the first release we will be enabling branching on these question types. Even with that narrow scope, it’s a large and complex piece of work that involves:
- how the user sets up branching
- how branching is displayed within the form flow
- what happens when a form editor changes a branch-dependent page or question
- what happens when a form user changes a branch-dependent answer
We’ll let our interaction designer, Fabien, tell you more about the complexities of branching design in a future update.
Paper transformation
Branching is our main priority, but we have still found time to squeeze in some extra discovery work.
In April, we established a separate team to explore how MoJ Forms might be used to support the transformation of paper forms at the MoJ. We found that there are over 1,000 paper forms in use across the department’s agencies. There is a broad desire among form owners to transform their forms but a lack of expertise and capacity. The discovery proposed and tested 3 different levels of support that could be extended to form owners to help them with the transformation. You can read more about this in ourlatest post on the MoJ Digital & Technology blog.
Revisiting the roadmap
In August, we surveyed a wide range of digital professionals across MoJ Digital & Technology to better understand the wide variety of form building needs and scenarios across the department. We’ll be using these findings to help shape our long-term roadmap.
One possible priority for us after branching will be a save and return feature. This would enable end form users to save progress on a form and return to complete it later. We have been talking to users to try and better understand this requirement. The research has highlighted a number of scenarios that we will need to consider carefully, such as vulnerable form users who might not have sole access to their email.
Video demo
Last month, we gave a demonstration of MoJ Forms to the GOV.UK team. It was a good chance to swap insights into several shared challenges, such as how to handle users changing branch-dependent answers from the check answers page.
If you weren’t able to catch the demo, please take a look at our first product video. It’s a short introduction to MoJ Forms, explaining what it does and how it can help teams who need a quick and easy way to collect information from the public. You can watch it now on our product site: https://moj-forms.service.justice.gov.uk/
As always, we are keen to know what you think of our work and hear how other teams are tackling these issues. Ping me on the cross-government Slack space or email moj-forms@digital.justice.gov.uk.