A menagerie of government forms

Big fan of CDS’s Forms initiative—it could have immense impact, not only for members of the public but for the public servants who serve them. Hillary’s post describes the merits of online forms, challenges in making them so, and different types of forms used by the Government of Canada (or most any government, probably!).

Form and workflow design impacts public servant productivity:

Helping the helpers

Public servants are the people on the other side, who use forms to deliver services effectively. How a form is designed can have a big impact on the efficiency of their workflows. Well-designed online forms offer advantages for public servants as well, but the act of getting a form online is far from simple for them.

A way to categorize forms:

We used what we learned to create an alternative categorization scheme, containing three data processing use cases: request processing, candidate selection, and business intelligence.

The post itself dives into each of those three in a bit more detail, to great effect.