MoJ Forms is quickly becoming the go-to approach for busy teams needing a fast, affordable and secure way to collect information from users.
A New Approach
The MoJ Forms platform enables teams to create and publish their own digital forms. It’s simple to use and the platform takes care of all the difficult parts like design standards, security and hosting. The result is a fully accessible, secure way of collecting information from users that looks and works like any government service.
Since we launched into Private Beta last year, we have been steadily expanding our features and capabilities. Teams can now use MoJ Forms to:
- ask questions and request information in a variety of formats
- present long lists of options using our newest autocomplete component
- apply custom validation rules
- show users different questions and information based on previous answers
- collect information by email in PDF and CSV
- monitor performance in Google Analytics
At the same time, we have improved the usability and accessibility of the editor - the browser-based application used to create, publish and manage forms. And we have continued to invest in the stability and security of the platform.
We are so confident in the strength of MoJ Forms that we are preparing to migrate the forms we currently maintain on our legacy form-building platform, Form Builder. This will enable teams to manage their own forms more easily and free us up to focus all of our energy on MoJ Forms.
Strength in Numbers
The introduction of branching - our name for using logic to show different questions - was a major milestone. We knew branching was something that even the simplest of forms would benefit from and our engagement really took off from that point. We now have around 70 users from every corner of MoJ who have either launched a form or are designing one.
Teams are using MoJ Forms to meet a lot of different needs, including:
- managing the influx of requests into a team
- gathering feedback on an event
- collecting recruitment leads
- receiving applications and enquiries as part of wider services
- improving existing paper and email-based processes
As word-of-mouth spreads, more and more teams are approaching us looking for help to solve their problems in a pragmatic and cost-effective way. These new users are helping to shape our roadmap and prioritise development. For example, some teams need to take payments from users so we are working on generating unique reference numbers to help them reconcile payments on GOV.UK Pay taken via payment links. Other teams with complex forms have users who may not be able to complete the form in one session so we are working on designs for a ‘save and return’ feature.
More Growth Ahead
This autumn will be a busy time. We will continue to expand our core functionality with basic API integration and confirmation emails as well as testing our designs for save and return with users. We should see a number of our legacy forms complete their migration onto MoJ Forms.
We will also start to build out our approach to quality assurance, standards and evaluation. We have spent a lot of time thinking about how we can help teams create good forms and have a lot of ideas. (More on this in a future blog post.) Most importantly, we expect to see more forms go live, welcome more new teams onboard and learn more about the many different ways teams need to collect information from their users.
1 comment
Comment by Iain Boyd posted on
Completely brilliant work, well done to everyone on the MOJ Forms team!
Would be really interested to learn more about your user research findings for the autocomplete feature, how you went about creating account permissions and the use cases for receiving form submission data by csv.
Look forward to future updates, thanks.