The Government Digital Service (GDS) has taken the GOV.UK Forms initiative into an ‘early access’ stage, saying that anyone in central government can use the platform by creating a trial account.
This is the latest stage in a workstream that began in mid-2021, aimed at making it easier for non-specialists to build online forms in HTML format, and went into private beta in April 2022.
Iain Boyd, engagement lead for the programme, said in a blogpost the trial accounts will not allow users to create live forms, but that they can learn about the platform and decide whether it will be useful to them.
They can also request an upgrade, based on criteria including whether they are confident in creating forms with the existing features, their organisation is ready to receive email responses at team addresses, and the forms get no more than 10,000 submissions per year. Also, they will not be able to publish any forms on GOV.UK themselves but will have to work with their departmental publishing teams to add a link and make any necessary content changes.
Managed approach
“We want to do this in a managed way, one that helps us to test out new and existing features in a live environment and to scale up confidently,” Boyd said.
He added: “We’re still in private beta and have lots to learn. Early access will help us do this in a scalable way, releasing value to our users and tying this to our roadmap.
“We’ll be inviting more and more users to access the platform as we develop more features.”
The platform currently has a limited set of features – such as being able to ask the names of people and organisations and contact details – but there have been recent additions such as a choice on how to format some questions and a function to include detailed guidance.
Boyd said GDS hopes to take the platform to public beta by spring of next year.
