Sunlight Labs

Government forms are often poorly designed, packed with unnecessary information, and created with little or no consideration for the person filling them out.

The process of getting a passport or citizenship itself (and plenty other government services) is complicated enough; it should not be further convoluted by faulty a application process.

In an effort to show an easier approach, I redesigned the U.S. Passport Form with the following principles in mind:

- Approachability A cluttered, complicated form can be daunting to the person about to fill it out. The redesigned form uses a light color theme with minimal amount of information presented.

- Readability The redesigned form uses easy-to-read dark fonts on a white background for contrast. Section headings are bigger and of different color to help divide the form into logical parts.

- Ease of Use The new form uses simple sentences to specify the requested information. For example, instead of "PRIMARY PERMANENT ADDRESS", the form asks: "What is your address?

To avoid showing more questions than is needed, parts of the form are hidden and appear only when a specific type of information is required from that particular person. For example, if after "Have you ever used a different name?" the user selects "Yes", only then will the additional Name field appear. Otherwise it stays hidden.

All appropriate fields were grouped logically to speed up data entry. The original passport form asked for a Mailing Address on one page, then asks for a Permanent Address many fields later, on a different page. The redesigned form keeps similar field types together, and is split into groups (Personal Information, Contact Information, etc.) to further aid in ease of data entry.

Other government forms can be redesigned using the above criteria, with a consistent look all across. There can be 1 main "Government Filing Center" website where people can fill out any gov. form quickly, and securely. This also saves time on the other side as a gov. official no longer has to scan the paper forms or manually enter them into a computer.

Better yet, the form central could securely store certain information like Name, Address, Work, etc, to automatically fill in another form, should the user choose to do so.