OpenForms

Led the research, testing, design and delivery of an in-demand feature for OpenForms: a B2B SaaS application that provides forms and workflows to local governments

About OpenForms

OpenForms is a B2B and B2C SaaS application that provides online forms and workflows to local governments across the world.

The brief

You may have noticed ‘Office use only’ sections at the bottom of government or official-looking forms. As an online forms provider for local government, these office use only sections were a commonly asked-for feature in the OpenForms application.

What I did

As the product designer of the application, it was my job:

To understand what office use only fields were being used for in our customers’ forms,
To understand how they were being used in their organisations,
To present the information gathered from all the points above to my team in an understandable format,
To see how our competitors had filled this capability within their own form offerings,
To prioritise the requirements that came out of the research with my team,
To work those prioritised requirements into the designs of the MVP of the office use only feature that would be incorporated into the OpenForms application,
To test the usability of the feature with clients, and
To write up the functional requirements of the feature.

The above is a high level overview of the process I followed to bring the office use only fields feature to life within OpenForms. I’ve broken down the steps and provided more detail below.

Understanding what our customers used office use only fields for

To kick off the research for office use only fields, I interviewed two members of the customer success team who had regular contact with clients. As they often talked to clients about the product, and what new features could be incorporated, it was useful to get their insight into what clients were specifically asking for when it came to office use only fields.

I then trawled through customer support tickets in Salesforce, trying to find any that were to do with office use only fields.

To gain more understanding, I designed a survey asking clients directly how office use only fields were used in their organisations. Quite a few clients responded to the survey, which helped with gaining more clarity on the feature.

I used the findings from the above to craft a semi-structured interview guide which I used to conduct user research with clients. In these interviews, I dug a bit deeper into how office use only fields were used in local government councils, and whether there were any variations between councils. I encouraged the dev team, PM, PO and the content designer to sit in and observe these interviews so they were as across the problems being faced by the council as I was.

Presenting the research results to the wider organisation

I then presented the research findings i.e. how councils use office only fields in their organisations to the wider OpenForms organisation with the use of simple graphics that I had designed in Figma.

Prioritising requirements and features with my team

After analysing the research, I compiled a list of requirements and features that the clients wanted for the office use only fields feature. I then facilitated a prioritisation workshop with the team to prioritise the requirements that would be going into the office use only fields MVP feature. After an initial discussion about the requirements with the team, the requirements were prioritised according to dev effort and user value. The requirements that ended up in the ‘low effort, high value’ quadrant of the prioritisation matrix ended up making it into the MVP.

Designing the feature

I initially started off with incorporating the prioritised requirements into the existing OpenForms application - this was in the form of hand drawn sketches, which were then transferred into Figma as low fidelity wireframes. I iterated on these designs several times; I sought feedback from my team with every iteration.

I had to design the flows for the 3 different user types that could access OpenForms i.e. the form Author, the Reviewer and the Reporter. Each user type could access different sections of OpenForms and had different roles within the application.

High level wireflow of the form author:

High level wireflow of the reviewer:

High level wireflow of the reporter:

Usability testing

When the team and I were happy with how the feature worked within OpenForms, I built a hi-fidelity working prototype of the feature in Figma and used it to conduct usability tests with some of our current clients.

I facilitated 5 usability tests with 5 different clients. The main objectives for this test were:

To see whether clients could figure out how office use only fields worked,
To gather their thoughts on the feature, and
To iron out any usability issues.

As with the user research sessions, I invited members of my team to sit in and observe the test sessions as they were being conducted so they were aware of the usability issues of the new feature as well.

After analysing the test results, I presented the findings to my team, with thoughts on how to fix the issues that were found. We discussed the findings and the solutions until we were happy with how to proceed with the designs.er:

Writing the functional specifications for the feature

Every UI element within the OpenForms application was documented in detail in Confluence. The documentation consisted of descriptions of each element, how they behaved within OpenForms, any unique condition(s) that the feature had that weren’t in line with existing OpenForms features, and any other configurations pertaining to that element.

Conclusion and next steps

The office use only feature was successfully deployed in March of 2023. While the feedback from the usability testing was overwhelmingly positive i.e. clients were happy that this feature was finally being rolled out, we nevertheless decided to keep a close eye on whether uptake of the feature kept up with these expectations.

It was decided to conduct another round of research and testing of the feature a few months after launching it to gauge whether it was meeting client expectations.

OpenForms

Led the research, testing, design and delivery of an in-demand feature for OpenForms: a B2B SaaS application that provides forms and workflows to local governments

About OpenForms

OpenForms is a B2B and B2C SaaS application that provides online forms and workflows to local governments across the world.

The brief

​You may have noticed ‘Office use only’ sections at the bottom of government or official-looking forms. As an online forms provider for local government, these office use only sections were a commonly asked-for feature in the OpenForms application.

What I did

As the product designer of the application, it was my job:

​

To understand what office use only fields were being used for in our customers’ forms,

To understand how they were being used in their organisations,

To present the information gathered from all the points above to my team in an understandable format,

To see how our competitors had filled this capability within their own form offerings,

To prioritise the requirements that came out of the research with my team,

To work those prioritised requirements into the designs of the MVP of the office use only feature that would be incorporated into the OpenForms application,

To test the usability of the feature with clients, and

To write up the functional requirements of the feature.

​

The above is a high level overview of the process I followed to bring the office use only fields feature to life within OpenForms. I’ve broken down the steps and provided more detail below.

Understanding what our customers used office use only fields for

Presenting the research results to the wider organisation

I then presented the research findings i.e. how councils use office only fields in their organisations to the wider OpenForms organisation with the use of simple graphics that I had designed in Figma.

Prioritising requirements and features with my team

Designing the feature

High level wireflow of the reviewer:

High level wireflow of the reporter:

Usability testing

To see whether clients could figure out how office use only fields worked,

To gather their thoughts on the feature, and

To iron out any usability issues.

​Writing the functional specifications for the feature

Conclusion and next steps

You may have noticed ‘Office use only’ sections at the bottom of government or official-looking forms. As an online forms provider for local government, these office use only sections were a commonly asked-for feature in the OpenForms application.

Writing the functional specifications for the feature