The Government Digital Service (GDS) and Home Office have set up a cross-government working group to share best practice in building online forms.
It is focused on building a specialised community for the process with a shared web space. There are also plans to discuss standards and governance, organise technical hack days and engage with suppliers.
The group will consider a series of possibilities, including the creation of a centrally managed software-as-a-service, standardising the schema for form building, setting up design communities for form based digital services, and helping smaller organisations by pairing them with larger bodies that have expertise in the area.
The move follows GDS and the Home Office hosting a hack day then workshop in June, which identified various problems with the current situation. These include the lack of a consistent government approach, a duplication of effort, common needs for functionalities such as searching by postcode, and the need for some technical skills to build forms on some designs.
Other issues include a need for more emphasis on interaction and content design, and a lack of resources in some organisations to maintain the tools they build.
Different approaches
The teams of technical architects in GDS and shared tech products in the Home Office jointly pointed out that government departments are taking different approaches in building forms. Some create and maintain their own tools, some develop bespoke forms without a form builder, some use a commercial solution and others take a combined approach.
“We’ve highlighted that there is a user need to solve this challenge across the government,” they said. “Any potential solutions need to cover all technical, design and governance aspects of forms in a digital service.”
Image from iStock ijeab
