Is the ELMER form design guidelines still current? Any other good government guidelines out there?

Question

I came across the ELMER form design guidelines published by the Norwegian Ministry of Trade and Industry, which gives a pretty comprehensive and reasonably well documented set of guidelines for the design of forms on government websites, which I guess can be generalized to public transaction workflows. However, I don't know if the published date of 2006 means that some of the concepts and ideas are a little bit out of date, especially in reference to mobile device design patterns.

Has anyone else come across similar government standards and what are their thoughts? I suggest that there should be similar standards drafted by organizations like UXPA to set a baseline standard so we don't have to keep debating certain questions here.

Answer 1

U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has created and maintains a wonderful website: http://www.usability.gov. It contains a wealth of UX resources of various types, including the ones from a government organization perspective (see section "Guidance and Government-specific Resources" at http://www.usability.gov/how-to-and-tools/index.html). Hope it helps.

UPDATE:

Information applicable to forms, is somewhat scattered across usability.gov site. However, in my opinion, some relevant sections are the following:

• Information related to OMB forms - US-specific, but may be used for other countries as well (http://www.usability.gov/how-to-and-tools/guidance/pra-overview.html);

• Various sections across the Research-Based Web Design and Usability Guidelines, as applicable to forms design (http://guidelines.usability.gov);

• Documents within the "Forms" category (http://guidelines.usability.gov/search/results?utf8=%E2%9C%93&q=&categories=Forms&x=37&y=26).

In addition to usability.gov site, the following non-US resources may be useful:

• Web Guide by Australian Government (http://webguide.gov.au), including the section on forms (http://webguide.gov.au/required-information/online-forms);

• Report "Improving and reviewing government forms: A practical guide" by UK's National Audit Office (www.governmentontheweb.org/sites/governmentontheweb.org/files/ImprovingReviewingGovernmentForms.pdf)

• Report "Difficult forms: How government agencies interact with citizens" by UK's National Audit Office (http://www.governmentontheweb.org/sites/governmentontheweb.org/files/Difficult_Forms.pdf), for citation, see: http://www.governmentontheweb.org/publications/24.