DC office releases guide for public servants to make digital forms accessible

At a minimum, government forms can be a headache for a resident seeking a building permit as they parse through jargon and redundant inquiries. But in some cases, forms can have serious impacts on a person’s life, like whether they get unemployment insurance or emergency housing, one expert says. A new field guide for public servants offers guidance to creating forms that are easy and accessible for residents in need of government services. 

“Poorly designed forms also have the power to burden, traumatize, dehumanize and even criminalize the person using them, and that's why they deserve our attention,” said Karissa Minnich, civic design manager at The Lab at DC, during FormFest, a virtual event hosted yesterday by the Beeck Center for Social Impact and Innovation and Code for America. 

As an example, Minnich pointed to forms that warn people of potential criminal consequences if a person includes inaccurate or incomplete information. 

“It’s off putting, but at worst … we’re further reinforcing the idea that asking for services may just not be worth the risk,” she explained. 

A new field guide developed and publicly released yesterday by The Lab at DC, a research and design team within the Executive Office of the Mayor in Washington, D.C. It aims to improve the form experience for officials and residents by offering suggestions for designing, user testing and assessing forms, based on the lab’s experience over the last decade helping the city’s agencies develop forms. 

When developing a digital form, agencies should first consider factors like the volume of form submissions typically received, the complexity of form features needed and data security measures, according to the guide. 

Programs and services that yield a high intake volume, defined as a hundred form submissions a week, could benefit from digital platforms like Alchemer or SurveyMonkey that allow for more form customization, the guide states. To store submitted forms, officials should also consider whether they should leverage a platform that can be linked to existing databases or include a built-in database like Qualtrics. 

Digital form features should also be leveraged to streamline a person’s experience when filling in their information, Minnich said. For instance, officials should code a form to skip a consequent question if a user’s response to the previous prompt does not require more information, she explained. 

Features like that help users move faster through the form, and can also help reduce confusion that may be caused by a paper form, Minnich said. 

Officials should also consider the readability of digital forms to ensure even the most vulnerable populations can easily participate, as some users require assistive tools to navigate online content, she said. 

Using plain language is one way to ensure form accessibility, according to the report. For example, officials should avoid including metaphors and other figurative speech because they could create a misunderstanding of the content for people who use digital translation tools to navigate forms, Minnich said. 

Different form sections should also be labeled with heading elements in a “logical hierarchy,” like No. 1 and No. 2, so that people who depend on screen readers can move through the form in the correct order, according to the guide. 

Assessing whether accessibility and usability practices work as intended is just as critical as implementing them into digital forms, Minnich said. A way for agencies to measure the form’s experience for users so that they can refine further designs is by conducting beta tests, the guide states. 

“Often forms simply aren't tested with the diversity of people who will use them, and despite our best attempts to create a good form on the first draft, no one can really account for everything. So we see common user errors and accessibility challenges start to creep up,” Minnich said. 

Through a beta test, which agencies can set up for a few days or even months at a time, officials can make the form live for early users before its official launch, according to the report. During this time, officials should closely monitor form submissions data and feedback. 

Last year, for example, D.C. launched a public benefit program for students that provided them with grocery assistance over summer break. The program leveraged a digital application form, which became live two days before it was officially opened, according to the report. 

Preliminary data showed that in the beta application submissions, 5.5% of applicants failed to mark their household members as a student — an identifier that made someone eligible for the program. Officials determined that this error could be caused by a typo or other disruptions in a person’s application rather than a misunderstanding of who the program was designed for, the report stated. 

Officials then added a notification feature to the form that prompted users to review and correct any necessary information if they failed to mark that their household included a student. The alert function reduced the form error rate from 5.5% to 1%, saving 630 families from being denied the summertime benefits, according to the report.