The toolkit is based on a guide that a team led by Professor Patrick Dunleavy from the LSE and Professor Helen Margetts from the Oxford Interet Institute developed for the National Audit Office and that underwent a consultation process within government. However, what I want to draw your attention to are some of the technical details of the online toolkit as in this major effort it was my responsibility to set up an interactive version of this checklist. So if you are only interested in checking how easy or difficult your form is to answer go straight to the checklist. If you are more technically inclined read on.

The whole site operates on Perl but what makes the checklist tick is Javascript. I am still used to a time when Javascript was frowned upon but with Ajax its now routinely used to make web pages interactive. It is still a pain to code until I came across the jQuery Javascript library. It extends Javascript with a variety of methods that just make it so much easier to code and adds additional functionality. In combination with a dedicated CSS framework, called jQueryUI, you have instant access to slick and beautiful features such as calendars and progress bars. Have a look here to see some examples! The latter has been incredibly helpful as I am not much of a design guru myself but by relying on the standard themes you get a rather professional looking site.

The checklist itself is a kind of interactive questionnaire that you go through page by page. It automatically calculates the difficulty score for a form as well as its individual sections and allows comparison with the difficulty scores of other forms rated by other users.

Some of the features I would like to mention are:

• The whole content as well as the structure (ie. the different sections of the checklist) are imported from an Excel file. In this way it is easily customisable and it is just one script for the three different types of forms: paper, online and phone.
• A load & save functionality – before saving the form an Ajax call checks if the filename is still available. Restoring a previously saved checklist was also tricky for a number of reasons, e.g. because the script won’t know from the save name what type of form it is but will redirect you accordingly.
• At the end of the checklist we provide feedback about the difficulty scores of forms rated by other users, in this way allowing you to compare the difficulty of your form with other forms. It is more of a gimmick really as of course these comparison have its problems but it gives you an idea.
• The whole site is using short, clean, memorable & “talking” URLs such as /paper-form/ or /saved/.
• No cookies. All necessary parameters are submitted via a html form.

The whole site is still in somewhat advanced beta stage so any bugs and problems you encounter – please let me know!

While it was very interesting to see parliamentary work, it is fair to say that the debate did not hold many surprises. The few interesting points worth mentioning are:

• The (usual) excuse for why government sites are just not as good as commercial sites: because governments are far more complex. While there is surely something different about governments and businesses (or so you would hope…), eBay, Amazon and Facebook are not exactly trivial as well and still reliably cater to millions of people in a simple and straight forward way.
• Alexis Cleveland, the Director General for Transformational Government (the ones that close down websites and move the rewritten content to Directgov) said that she would like to see more opportunities for citizens to give their views on sites and services which can only be welcomed. (As a side note, really a bit of a give-away for the government. Searching for “Transformational Government Cabinet Office” on Google brings as the number one hit an error page at the Cabinet Office website)
• There was a lot of discussion about how the move to more online channels will disadvantage those who are not capable of using the Internet who are often the ones who need public services the most. While it is surely a problem if attention (and hence money) is focused on online interactions on the expense of options for traditional face to face contacts, I was surprised that nobody mentioned the obvious benefit of the online strategy:
  1. most people do not want interpersonal communication (ie. queuing at inconvenient opening hours) but turn to the Web as hassle-free way to get things done quickly,
  2. which should in turn leave staff in offices with more time to deal with the people who really need and appreciate their help. Now one might argue that the whole point of government web services is to save money by getting rid of civil servants but you still have cost-savings by having people volunteer their information in electronic form (although I reckon it is probably printed out and then again keyed in by someone…)

You can listen to the full discussion here (should you REALLY wish so) but only for the next 28 days. You wonder why that is. Cannot be that difficult to keep the stuff. But it seems not uncommon these days for UK officials to get rid of important data …