Communication Untangled: Untangling forms

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

• Communication Untangled: Untangling menus

• Communication Untangled: Untangling brand