Product design, Interaction design, Service design

Brief

Initially the goal was to help the Ministry of Justice move away from paper, email and PDF/word document based forms. It soon became clear we had to think beyond tools and platforms and explore a new process to create services for government that would not justify months of effort from a full multidisciplinary team.

Outcomes

MoJ Forms is now web application, platform and process used by over 100 colleagues at the MoJ, providing the fastest way to good, accessible and mobile friendly GOV.UK forms.

Key challenge

Create a tool that could be used by colleagues with little understanding of form design or the GOV.UK design system and allow them to deliver good GOV.UK forms that are easy to use, mobile friendly and accessible.

Beyond effective interaction design, we had to innovate ways of ensuring quality through a balance of templates, support, safeguards and process.

Bring order to hundreds of screens

Government forms can go from a few screens in a single path, to very large complex forms with hundreds of screens, branching in dozens of separate paths. I've designed a flow view that automatically lay it all out clearly, helping users make sense of their form without having to manually draw such a diagram elsewhere.

Edit in place

This powerful tools bring a What You See Is What You Get approach, allowing colleagues not trained in design or development to immediately understand what their form will look like.

Growing beyond the web design system to deliver a web app experience

While the GOV.UK design system is a fantastic way to deliver website, it lack components that are optimised for repeated professional use such as action buttons and menus, so I've created them. Read more in my post on the Design in Government blog

What I did

• Complete end to end interaction and visual design.
• Service design of the new end to end journey from form creation, review to publishing.
• Prototyping to support Usability Testing and development.
• Working closely with content and developer colleague towards making all these new complex component accessible.
• Ran workshops across the research, interaction, content and service design professional communities to inform our new process.
• Actively share work and collaborate across government departments.