Quick Bite #6: Discovery questions for a digital forms solution

You need to build a form… how do you scope it?

Problem statement

Forms of all sorts are driving a lot of business, especially in services industry. Remember last time you had to apply for a permit, apply for a job, enroll into a training course or get any service from the government? Chances are, you had to fill in a long form.

Photo by Leon Dewiwje on Unsplash

It is hard to design a good, functional, easy to use form. It is even harder to build a digital solution to manage those.

This questionnaire is designed to help you get started scoping a form processing solution.

Business context

Objectives

1. What are the key objectives for forms usage?
2. Which business problems do the forms help to solve?
3. How does the success of form implementation looks like?
4. How can we measure it?

Context

1. Which business units use forms?
2. What are the key business processes around forms? Let’s map them.
3. What are the measures of success for these processes?
4. Who uses the data collected?
5. Do you have any other stakeholders we have not discussed before? What are their responsibilities?
6. Who fills the forms? Who are the end users?
7. Who creates and maintains the forms? Are there any publishing rules (e.g. a form needs to be approved by a business unit before being published)

Roadmap

1. What has been implemented so far?
2. What are the future plans? What do we want to implement right now vs. in half a year, year, three years?

Challenges

1. What are the key challenges and pain points with the current implementation?

Platform functionality

Current state analysis

1. Which technology platforms do you use in the context of forms?
2. What are the integrations? Inbound and outbound integrations.
3. What types of forms do you have? Do you have any forms classification?
4. Do we plan to keep all of these forms going forward?

Functionality

1. What are your business use cases for the forms in scope? Who and when interacts with them and for what purpose?
2. Which data is collected by the forms & how it is processed? Do you have lists of fields for the forms? What are the validations for these fields?
3. How many languages do we need to support?
4. Which channels do we need to support? (e.g. web, mobile)
5. Which geographies do we need to support?
6. Are there any variations of the forms depending on the user input, or user type, or other business rules?
7. Are there any workflows triggered by the forms?
8. Do you need signage services?
9. Do you need to trigger emails from the forms?
10. Do you need document assembly with the forms data? (PDF, XML, etc.)

Personalisation

1. Who can access the forms on the front end?
2. Is there any need for content targeting?
3. Is there any need to pre-fill the forms?
4. Is there any need to customise the form depending on who the user is?

Design

1. What is the look and feel of the forms? Are there any designs or wire-frames to comply with? Have any styling been done already?
2. Are there any variations of the design (e.g. different style guide for different business units or use cases)?
3. Any device compatibility considerations that we need to be aware of?

Data processing

1. Is any data aggregation needed?
2. What are the reporting needs?
3. Any specific data processing needs that we need to know about?

Non-functional requirements

Performance

1. How many form views and submissions per hour can we expect?
2. How the load may change over time?
3. What are the peak load figures?
4. Do you have any concerns regarding response times?

Traffic drivers

1. What drives the traffic to the forms?
2. Are there any campaigns that we need to be aware of?
3. What can result in unusual traffic peaks?
4. Are there any seasonal traffic trends?

Backoffice performance

1. How many backoffice users do you have? How many do you expect to use the system concurrently?
2. How frequently do you publish new forms?

Future

1. What is the projected traffic growth rate?

Analytics

1. Which systems are used for web analytics?
2. Do you have any issues with the current analytics set up?
3. Do you have any specific analytics needs?

Security

1. Do you have any specific security needs or compliance that we need to know about?
2. Do you have any existing security concerns that you want to address?

SEO

1. Do you have any specific requirements for URL structure or other SEO related requirements?

Accessibility

1. Do you have any specific accessibility requirements?
2. Do you know if your audience is likely to need any assitance in working the forms?

Rollout

1. Which forms do we need to create for the initial rollout?
2. Which forms will be created later?

Training needs

1. Who is the audience for training?
2. What is their current level of confidence with the system?
3. Which topics do you want us to cover during training?
4. Do you want to discuss any specific use cases during the training?

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