Questions for your questions

Yesterday, to no fanfare, I put live a significant iteration to the non-digital service. The service helps users make a choice on how their children’s data can be used.

Part of the new process was an iteration on a previous form. The work brought together:

new visual system
reduced list of identity documents required
simplified process to prove parental responsibility
user focused words and ways of asking questions

Redesigning the forms with the team meant questioning everything. Things we held self-evident. Rules that were stuck-in-stone. Policy.

Happily the whole team leapt into this work. Sam (grad content designer) and I had no need to canvas for support to charge ahead with this work.

It made me realise that you could better explore the tough parts of any service with the non-digital version first. That is, inputting information, reading it and processes. But not just pretend stuff (paper prototypes). But actual real life submissions. Paper is cheap. Easy to iterate. But live. If your service is a policy-driven thing. What better way to test drive whether that policy delivers what it needs to?

I also felt that there are many questions you need to ask when designing a service that gets information from a user. That is, questions that all services, digital or not, should answer.

I wrote some of these questions down and shared them. And in the spirit of making things open. Here is my first go at questions to ask yourself when designing services and forms.