Magic Form Builder

See the full deck on Google Slides. ↗ (opens in new tab)

Problem

How do we convince officers to reduce paper forms in government? The inspiration for this started with FormSG’s paperless forms campaign in 2023, where the team identified that there are still many paper forms in government. Is the solution then to just simply convince more of these public officers to use FormSG? 

Solution

Our hypothesis is: If we make it easy for public officers to convert forms or create new forms, naturally they would be more motivated to convert their workflows digitally. “Doing the right thing should be made simple”!

Hence we built FormSG’s magic form builder to make it simple for public officers in Singapore to create a form by:

• Uploading a PDF form

• Writing a prompt 

Powered by large language models, the magic form builder helps public officers create an entire form in less than a minute! We believe this is much quicker than creating every question from scratch, allowing public officers to focus their efforts on more important parts of form building (such as data collection and processing)!

What users are saying?

Originally, we allowed the public officer to amend the questions and field types before creating the form (see image). However, this was confusing hence we removed this to simplify the process.

Some public officers were not sure how to write the prompt, hence we provided ideas/suggestions in the second iteration which they can click on and fill the prompt box.

In addition, there was a waiting time of ~3 minutes during the building process in the first version, but we managed to reduce that to 1 minute by improving the prompt engineering and reducing the size of messages. In order to make the wait time less excruciating, we also designed a cute GIF to show that “your form is building”. It is also a play on the words 🙂.

Public officers tried out the prototype on demo day. The initial feedback was extremely positive! Users agreed that the prompt-based approach of creating forms would save them time by providing a "template" to edit. At the same time, the PDF conversion mode drastically simplifies the process of digitalising paper forms.

The most common question on demo day was, "When would this be available for us to use?" Over 30 public officers across different agencies have also registered their interest in using the Magic Form Builder.

Like what you see? Have a chat ↗ (opens in new tab) with us!

Team members