Managing demand: designing forms that work
Throughout lockdown, the team at South West London Law Centres (SWLLC) has been busy. Not only were they recognised in the Best Firm/Not-for-Profit category at the ‘Legal aid Oscars’, they have also recently launched their new website with a dynamic and easy-to-use webform for clients, developed with the help of Hands Up and funded through a Lottery Awards for All grant.
In this article, we share some top tips to keep in mind when designing web enquiries and what we’ve learned from speaking with SWLLC about their design process and the impact of the new webform on their service.
Good services are verbs. Bad services are nouns.
In Good Services, Lou Downe describes a service as an activity that needs to be done. By using terms that help-seekers can easily respond to, like ‘Get advice’ and ‘Get help now’, SWLLC has made their services easy to find, especially by those who have no prior knowledge of what they need to do. The webforms were also designed with accessibility in mind and are available in any of around 100 languages at the click of a button.
Don’t make me think!
On top of this, the transition between the homepage and webform is a mindless unambiguous choice. The help-seeker can rely on recognition rather than recall when deciding what advice they need. The design is minimalist and streamlined, meaning that only the most relevant information is visible when the help-seeker arrives on the site.
The investment and development of this experience has not only benefited the help-seekers, it has also been good for the organisation. With enquiries now being submitted through the web and some forms (such as those for Debt or Employment advice) being sent direct to the individual teams, the number of voicemail messages the Admin team has to respond to has dropped from approximately 100 a day to around 26.
Know why you’re asking every question
The webform works because it only asks for information when required. The form changes as answers are given, so the Centre is not collecting information which is not needed in the context of the help-seeker’s previous answers. This also makes it clear to the help-seeker why the Centre is asking for each piece of information. When designing the webform, the developers at SWLLC spoke with each team to find out what they need to know and refined this into a series of simple questions. The result: the legal teams report having better information, which makes the task of triaging clients and assessing cases easier and quicker.
Common components
We reviewed SWLLC’s forms and identified 6 common components:
- Service Information: Provides an overview of what the team can and cannot help with. It also provides contact details if the help-seeker is unable to use the advice checker.
- Eligibility: A series of dynamic questions to confirm eligibility that encourages users to seek help elsewhere if their answers indicate that the service “can’t help with their issue”.
- Contact Details: Standard contact details are requested along with information about the help-seeker’s circumstances.
- Specifics of legal problem: These questions are tailored for the legal issue and collect details from the help-seeker, that are informative, not determinative.
- Documentation required: Not relevant for every area of law, the forms which do request documentation provide further guidance of the types of documents needed.
- Consent: An important aspect present in each form are two questions that ask for consent to share details with legal advisors and consent for monitoring and evaluation purposes.
Beyond the form
SWLLC is aware that there are further improvements to be made. One of their next steps will be to ensure the structured data they are collecting remains structured so that they can effectively collect, analyse, and draw insights from it.
The introduction of the webform has resulted in changes to back-stage processes. Even after help-seekers are signposted, they often still want to talk to someone, observed the administrator. There can be a number of reasons for this, an obvious one being that they just want to speak to a person. Understanding those intentions by observation is key and, once you have clarity over those needs, one can design user journeys accordingly. One journey may well be: fill in form > get signposted > client needs reassurance > contact us anyway. There is nothing wrong with this. It is only perceived as failure if one assumes that all help-seekers will follow the same user journey.
Happy clients
Overall, many of the clients we spoke to were pleasantly surprised by the new service:
“I filled out the form, got a call from [the receptionist] who booked the appointment, then got a call from the lawyer who I spoke to for 27 minutes and got a detailed answer to my enquiry”
“It all actually happened really quickly”
Bravo SWLLC! Here’s to many more successful developments.
