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PODCAST

Communication Untangled: Untangling forms

Sue Keogh
Sue KeoghSookio

Posted: Wed 29th Jan 2025

Iain Boyd and Adam Robertson from GOV.UK Forms at the Government Digital Service share best practices in designing online forms to capture information efficiently and ethically.

Online forms are so intuitive you hardly notice you’ve filled them in. Or they take so long to complete that you just lose the will to live.

Or maybe you’re the one creating the form and trying to gather the information. People just don’t fill them in properly! How can you work with data that’s incomplete?

An organisation dealing with this issue on a massive scale is the Government Digital Service (GDS), which is behind GOV.UK, the website for the UK government.

The goal is to make digital government simpler, clearer and faster for everyone.

More than 13 million people use GOV.UK each week, and there are more than a billion transactions completed on the site a year – things like applying for a driving licence, filing a tax return or renewing your passport.

GDS is introducing its new forms builder tool designed to make government forms more accessible and easier to fill in. They’ll be faster to process too with fewer errors.

Discover the dark patterns on the web that set out to trick us.

Relevant resources

Sue Keogh
Sue KeoghSookio
Hello, I’m a digital marketing agency founder and communications consultant in Cambridge. After a decade in broadcast media producing radio and digital content with the BBC, ITV and Magic FM, and as a homepage editor for Yahoo and AOL, in 2008 I founded Sookio. I built and scaled the agency through intense periods of change – pandemic, fire, recession, four premises, shift to hybrid working – and oversaw the delivery of targeted marketing campaigns for clients in education, science/tech, B2B and the public sector, reaching millions of people and increasing footfall, applicants, and revenue. In 2024 I pivoted the business to go from agency to consultancy, enabling me to draw on my wealth of experience in marketing, leadership and business operations and offer a more streamlined set of services: Audits and recommendations Strategy and support Consultancy Training: Social media, writing for marketing, building visibility It's communications from the inside out. I’m someone who lives and breathes marketing and has closely followed digital trends since the earliest days of social media, but knows how to get the foundations right too – the tools, the processes, the best ways to nurture client relationships and motivate your team. I love working with clients to share this knowledge and solve problems together that lead to a happier, more productive, and more profitable business. Values (see more on my About page) 1. Innovation for the betterment of society 2. Empowering others through knowledge, skills and opportunities 3. Best practice in communication Handy to know (see my full bio) Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Marketing, and RSA National Business Women’s Awards judge Host Skillshare courses taken by 10k+ people Founder of work experience initiatives which have helped 150+ young people kickstart their career in marketing Host of Communication Untangled podcast and regular speaker on marketing, digital, communications Winner of multiple awards for myself and the business including Service Excellence, Business Person of the Year, Community, Website

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