Someone asked me about writing good questions for forms. As usual I recommended the NHS Digital service manual page as a favourite resource – and then I thought “have I put that on my website?” And I hadn’t. So here it is (and I’ve added it to my best practice page, too).
- NHS Digital service manual – How to write good questions for forms
- My page: Best practice in forms design
I enjoy observing the NHS service manual team work in the open on GitHub. Especially as a focus of their work recently is around encouraging people (and I include me) to do just that:
I’m proud to say that the service manual team drew on earlier work led by me to identify the topics, and did a lot of content design and user research to condense many ideas into one very useful page. If you’d like to dig into the history, here are two background posts and then a summary of what they did:
- March 2019, by me: Draft curriculum for how to design a form based on discussions with designers in Leeds
- April 2019, by me: Discussing a topic map for how to design a better form based on further work in Leeds and a seminar for Digital.gov
- November 2019, blog post by Sara Wilcox about making this advice: How to write good questions
