Digital Signature Legality for Government in United Kingdom

How to eSign a document: digital signature legality for Government in United Kingdom

so here at GDs we're focused on making digital government simpler clearer and faster for everyone I'm responsible for GDs digital service platform we provide services such as notify pay and the guuk design system we've created these services to deliver simple costeffective products that integrate with gov.uk and can be used to support the needs of departments across the government by providing common solutions to the way we all collect money or how we contact people provides time-saving digital Solutions it means there's no need to reinvent the wheel or go to market through lengthy and costly procurement exercises we also want to make it easy for teams to use our services regardless of their technical skills so that we deliver a package of accessible services that integrate seamlessly across the government and sit with g at UK to create these common Solutions involves constant learning and sharing with government teams to understand your needs and how best our services can solve any problems that you have we're here to make life easier for you and easier for the public so thank you for joining us today I hope you'll all enjoy hearing about one of our newest products go. UK fors if you've not come across Guk forums before it's our online form Builder it's a quick and easy way to create online forms replacing the need for PDFs and document-based forms as you'll see today in just a matter of minutes you can create a new online form that's quick to process and focused on accessibility making it even easier for people to complete best of all there's no need for any any technical knowledge and it's completely free I'll shortly be passing you over to Holly our lead delivery manager who'll take us through how to start building forms we'll hear from James our lead technical architect we also have John Plowman from the driver vehicle standards agency joining us today and he'll be sharing the dvsa's experience of using gov.uk forums and how it has helped him then Arena will take us through the next steps and future features as I mentioned earlier please add any questions you have to the chat and the team will read those out after the presentations and if you haven't already set up a trial account for yourselves anyone across government with a.gov email address can create one and start creating forms at gov.uk fors choose the get started option so over to Harley to provide a demonstration of go UK forums um thanks so much amander I'm just going to share my screen uh just bear with me for a minute everyone sorry about this um okay so hopefully you can all see that um so for this demo I'm going to show you what it would be like to create a form as an editor user which is our standard user you can make forms live as amand has mentioned we have a trial account to um so as you can see when we start off we can see all the forms that users in our organization have already created sorry some of these have slightly silly names because they're test forms um so however I'm going to make a new form so I'm going to click on create a form um we start off sorry live demos are the worst there we go we start off uh by naming our form uh there's lots of you on the call today so I'm going to build a form so that you can give feed back on this webinar if you would like to so I'll save and continue I'm now showing a simple to follow step-by-step guide of what I need to do to get a form made and labels on the right show the status of each only once all of these are marked completed can I make my form live but a form is nothing without some questions so let's add some questions so I'll click here okay so we ask people what type of answer they need for a question to help them get to the right type of question you can see we've got several options here but I'm first start by asking what your name is okay um so for answer types uh like name date of birth and address we use autofill which automatically puts in people's personal information they have on their devices this makes our forms more accessible and easy to use to do this feature we have to ask form creators how they'd like to collect a person's name they can do it as one single box um two boxes or three including a middle name um for this I'm going to select full name in a single box I'm not going to ask for title uh some forms do require this so the option is there but we like to remind users with this text here um to think carefully about whether title or any other information is absolutely necessary okay and then I'll click on continue and here's where we fill in the details about our question uh let's start with the question title which uh in this case is pretty simple what is your name um you'll see I've added that as a question as if I was asking you to make it nice and clear for the um person filling in the form uh we can also add in some hint text I I'm just going to suggest that maybe people answer their name as it appears in their passport okay this helps the user know what to answer um we don't need more detailed guidance for this question but we will come back to this feature later and we can mark it as optional if we want to here um but I don't want to do that right now so I'm going to leave that unchecked uh we can change any of the settings if we want but I'm not going to so I will click on Save question next I want to know uh which webinar the person attends did so I'll add another question and I'm going to select date as my answer type so for the autofill reasons I've discussed it now asks if I want a date of birth I don't and I'll continue and then my question title is sorry I'm just copying and pasting from a Word document so that's why there are slight pauses what was the date of the webinar you attended um you can add a bit of hint text and in this case I'm going to copy and paste the example because that's fine covers what I need um again I don't need guidance and I don't want this one to be optional so I just click on Save question uh next I need to know whether the person has used a form build before so to do this I'm going to ask them a simple yes or no question um so I'm going to pick selection from a list of options and then continue and my question is going to be have you ever built a form using a form Builder and I click on continue here I can add some additional settings I can say I want users to select just one option instead of multiple which I'm going to do because I only want one answer and I can also provide in none of the above if I want to but I don't want to do that I just want a simple yes there's my auto fill or no okay um so when I add guidance oh sorry and then I'll click on continue okay uh okay uh next up I I'm going to add some hint text um which is just going to say select one option cannot use that um I don't want to add any more detailed guidance um actually I'm really sorry I do want to add more detailed guidance to this question so I'm going to just click on um add guidance here um so first of all I'm asked for a heading for my page um which makes it clear to the person filling in the form what this page is actually about what sort of question they can expect here and why I'm giving them some additional guidance so and what you can see down here is I've got a box that I can put my uh guidance in I've got some I made earlier which I'm copying and pasting from a Word document um as you can see it's automatically pulled in my formatting for me so it's turned my hyp uh my hylink into markdown and it's also picked up on my um bullet points I can go and check on preview there and I can see that's all pulled through and looks great if I wanted more formatting help I've got a little ion here and I can read about how to use markdown if I want to um and I can also use these uh helpful buttons here to help me add lengths bullets and headers okay so I'm happy with what that's looking like on my preview so I'm going to click on continue um so I'm happy with this I'll put in some guidance to say select one option because didn't save that which was silly and then I'll click save question okay and then I'm going to add another question so if someone said they used a form Builder before I now need to ask for more detail about that experience so I'm going to add a text question um it might be quite a long answer so I'm going to ask for more than a single line of text and my question will be uh can you provide further details about the form Builder or builders that you've used before so again I've just copied and pasted that I'm also going to add um a little bit of hint text which again I'm copying and pasting from my document um just to ask them to provide a bit of context of their use so now my next oh sorry now next I could make this question optional so that those users users who said they've not used a form bufer before can just skip this question but I'm going to do this in a slightly better way um so sorry of course my voice is giving up sorry everyone so I'm going to save my question come on internet there we go um and then I'm going to go back to my questions so you can see here all of the questions that I've made if I wanted to I could move the order around so I can move them up and down using these buttons and I can also go back and edit them from this screen if I want to what I'm going to do now um is add a root so that if somebody hasn't used a form Builder before they only enter the information they need to so I'll just click on add a question route um at the moment this can only be done from a um an a question where you select one item from a list I've only got one question type like that so I'll select that question and then if if they're answering that no they've never used another form Builder before then I want to take them straight to the check the answers before submitting page so they'll skip that question entirely because it's not relevant to them okay so those are my questions and you can see now it details what my root is as well okay so I'm done with my questions so I'll add them mark them as completed and save and continue okay great so I'm done with my questions and now what I'm going to do is whiz through everything else so that I can show you how to make this form live okay so I'll add a declaration for people to agree to um this is really important if there are any legal ramifications for the form here I'm just going to copy and paste the example because hopefully that's okay and then I'll say this is complete and I'll save and continue um adding information about what happens next um this is what the user will see when they submit the form and it gives them useful information about next steps or further actions they might need to take um again for ease I'm just going to copy and paste the example text here again you can add formatting here if you want to um similar to what we saw on the detailed guidance there's formatting help again down here and you can add bullets numbered lists and links we don't have headers here though okay so I can preview that looks good and then I'll save and continue okay so you can see those all showing is completed next I want to set the email address that my completed forms will be sent to in this case I'm going to use my own email um for ease um but that could be a shared group email or whatever is needed by the people building the form so I'll save and continue now what's happened is a confirmation code has been sent to my email address um so I'll just pull that from my email and that's just to make sure there's no spelling errors in the email address it's definitely the one that you want to use um just to add a vague level of security as well so I'll enter the email address confirmation code there save and continue great so it tells me that my email address is confirmed and it confirms again where my completed forms will be sent and then I can go back to continue creating a form and as you can see this section is now completed okay last two we're nearly there um providing a link to privacy information for this form um You probably all know why we need to provide a link to Privacy Information so I won't explain that to you and I am just going to copy and paste the example as well there is obviously lots of um content here to help people building forms if they do need more information um last one is providing contact details for support um again this will be for the person filling in the form so if I want to give them an email address a phone number or an online contact link I can do all three or if I don't want to do all three I can just say I want to I don't want to give them my gmail that would be a terrible idea um I'll give them my cabinet office email so so if you need any help while you're filling in this form you'll come through to me and I'll do my best and then I will save and continue okay so I've completed everything before I make my form live I'm going to preview the form and show you what this will look like for a form of fillerina I'm going to move to a different Tab and I'm just going to double check that you can see that yeah okay great um okay so as you can see there's lots of messaging to say this is a preview of the form reminding you not to enter personal information it says draft all over the shop what's your name it's being very careful so I'll enter my name again my autofill is is working because that's how we've um designed this if I want to get help there's that email that I put in earlier and that'll appear on every page so I'll continue the date of the webinar I attended is today's date which of course is the first of February and it's 2024 which I keep forgetting and then continue have you ever built a form using a form Builder I am going to say no and then I'm going to continue I can see all the guidance there and if I want to I can click for further information but I think it's a no so I'll click there and then I come to the um final screen which shows me all the answers that I've um filled in and what I've put in there now I've realized I actually have used the Builder before so I'm going to go back and I'll say yes and now you'll see that I see this additional question asking me for further details so I'll just say buil a form so that you can see that pulling through so now you'll see I've got four answers and it's pulled through that final answer there and you can also see that I just used that change functionality which users can use at any stage to go back and change any of their answers I also get asked if I want to get an email confirming my form has been submitted again I'll use my own um cabinet office email and then there's declaration and by submitting this form I'm agreeing to that declaration that I added agree and submit then I get the what happens next form and there's that text I added in there as well as well as a big green box to tell me that everything's gone well okay great so I'll go back to my form that preview all looked good then I'll click on make your form live little bit of information about where it needs to be published um so that will be go UK and you need speak to your publishing team and then I click on yes to say make it live save and continue and there's my form it's live um so I'll copy that URL to the clipboard and I'll share that with you all in the chat uh so if anybody does want to give some feedback on this webinar it will go directly to me but I'm happy to read it so you can send it over and that's all from me I'm G to stop sharing my screen if I can work out how to uh and I will oh okay I don't know what is happening with my zoom I will sort this out apologies I'll stop sharing my screen I have stopped that's fine and I'm going to pass over to our lead technical architect uh James Shepard thanks everyone thanks very much Holly um well done on a successful live demo always always a challenge um so yes hi everyone I'm Jam Shepards I'm a technical architect at the government digital service I'm going to give you a very brief technical overview so here's gov.uk forms um where created forms such as the one you just saw Holly create uh in the demo uh that's where they get stored users will follow a link on gov.uk that will take them to the form that they need to complete the user will provide answers to the questions again just as you saw in the demo and when they submit the form uh that'll be sent by email to the address use specif ify and for forms with low submission volumes manually processing each form might be appropriate to your needs uh but for larger volumes you may want to consider something some form of Automation and in fact we've already seen teams starting to do this it was mentioned earlier about you not needing technical uh knowledge to use this system that's absolutely correct but if you do have it or you have access to people with technical capabilities within your organization um you may be interested in in other approaches this isn't available yet but we are actively uh looking into how we might provide structured data such as in adjacent payload uh through to some sort of system integration on your side and we're very keen to talk to people about this I'll give you some details shortly um gov.uk forms follows the 14 Cloud security principles from the ncsc the national cyber security Center so including things such as data and Transit protection asset protection and resilience uh having a governance framework and using identity and Authentication um this will be uh of relevance to you if you have some kind of internal process uh some sort of internal uh governance process that you might need to go through before your organization starts to use gov.uk for live forms so in summary please get in touch with us if you'd like to talk about uh automated form processing uh if you'd like to talk about how we might integrate uh your systems with go UK forms if you want to talk about your own technical governance and improval processes and how we can support you with that or indeed if you have any other technical questions um I will provide the links in the chat just after I finished speaking and finally from me uh Point 12 of the G.K service standard talks about making new source code open and we've tried to do this wherever we wherever possible on form so again we've made our source code available on GitHub and again I will provide the link in the chat if this is something of interest to you thanks for your attention I'm now going to hand over to John from the dbsa thank you very much James good afternoon everyone um I'm John plaman I'm the head of content design at the driver and vehicle standards agency or dvsa uh we've been a beta partner with gov.uk forms for about a year now um we've so far published seven gov.uk forms we actually published our sixth and seventh forms at 11: a.m. today um which just coincidental that it um was with today's webinar um and so far we've had about 2,000 submissions from users from across all of our forms we've got about 130 more document-based forms published on go. so there's lots more to do but I wanted to share three things with you about our experience of working with go. UK form so far so the first point is that we'd recommend getting an organization-wide approach to the adoption of gov.uk forms for example in dvsa we've decided that we'll centralize the design and Publishing of gov.uk forms in our content design team that might not be right for your organization but that's what's working best for us there are other things that you will need to agree in your organization if you haven't already for example what's your definition of a form what's your process for creating privacy notices for forms how are you going to monitor their performance how are we going to collect feedback from users and from your colleagues who are dealing with the form submissions and how are you going to prioritize which forms to convert to gov.uk forms and that brings me on to my second recommendation make sure you have a really good record of all the externally published forms in your organization it can be really helpful as you're doing that to look at how complex the existing forms are and categorize them um looking at things whether or not they need supporting documents for example do users need to make a payment with them and which service areas do they belong to we've also found it's really helpful to keep a record on whether or not there already work taking place in your organization to transform that form or the process that it's part of as part of building a digital service for example and also think a bit wider than just document-based forms like PDFs or word forms you've have we're using gov.uk forms to collect structured information from users so we found that there are lots of places on gov.uk where we ask users to email sets of information to us for example send your name your driving license number your driving test reference number and your postcode to us so what our teams find is that when users are asked to email lists of information to them like that users tend to send maybe one or two of the pieces of information and forget the second and third or the fourth and then our teams need to go back to the user and ask for that missing information it's time consuming and it's frustrating both for our colleagues and for users so we've started to replace some of those email processes with gov.uk forms so users can then only send the form after they've given everything that we need and in lots of cases the data can be validated too in the um input as the user typing it in you you can work with your content team to audit where you have email addresses on gov.uk collecting structured information by using the Goof Search tool um so if you're not from a Content team it's well worth going and talking to your content team about how to do that the third and final thing that I wanted to share um with you is that go. forms as you will have seen in the demo is very easy to use and we're regularly seeing improvements and new features being added based on the feedback that we're giving and that's really nice to see that when we give a suggestion that a few weeks later um a new feature is being shipped or a refinement is being shipped and all of this is saving um teams at dvsa time and we want to work with GDs to help quantify how much time and money we're starting to save um so that we can share that more broadly and help you all understand kind of why you might want to start adopting gov.uk forms I do want just share one piece of feedback uh that I absolutely love from a processing team um in dvsa um they're getting obviously the form submissions coming in and based on the emails that they're now getting they say that they look awesome it's really easy for them to action now and it gives them all the details that they need which is a huge Improvement for that team so if you're thinking about using gov.uk forms but are worried it might be hard to use don't be it isn't it'll make life easier for your colleagues and for your users so I'm going to pass you over now to Arena and she's going to tell you about the next steps for go. UK forms brilliant thanks a lot John um good afternoon everyone I'm enen and I'm the lead prod manager on gav forms um so I'll talk you through our road map and as part of that hopefully answer some of the questions that have been raised on um the meeting chat um and then I'll also talk you through kind of our wider work next um so um let's go through a little bit what's coming up for us um a few provisors before I go into it this is a road map uh as everything as bestl plans this is subject to change um we always um are open and work together with with departments so um as and when we find the information um there might be a need to to slightly pivot and change some of this but uh currently this is our um this is how we'll Endeavor to um transform and build on on what we already have um so as you've seen we have a very powerful tool um already but there are a few more um kind of significant features which we're hoping to ship in the next year so currently um we are working on um the ability to add a payment link to a form so forms can accept payments um and this is powered by another uh great product that we have in our um GDs um platform suit gav pay um we are also making significant improvements to our user access management processes um this would allow um departments including the dvsa to have this more centralized uh Control Function whilst also um working through things and using gav forms in a much more self-service way um it would also um kind of allow us as a forms team um to be in control and to make sure that our platform is used um in the right way and is is scalable um we're hoping uh currently we are in in private beta so this means we have restricted a bit the access we are hoping to go into public beta in um the spring so hopefully in April um at which point everyone will be able to uh start creating a lot more forms in a more self-service way with cavik forms and we're very excited for this once we're in public beta um the hard work actually starts um we have a lot more features to add so we will be um doing some work behind the scenes to um move on to a different way that we send our um emails to um form processors um so that would unlock the ability for forms to also accept um up uploading supporting documentation as many forms obviously do um I don't know such as like birth certificate um we'll also um be adding the ability for questions to have multiple answers um to the same question so for example if you have dress history for the last 5 years often youve removed places you want to add multiple answers um thereafter um we want to um work on adding more submission types so this is um U James our technical architect already alluded to this and there was a question in the chat um about being able to um submit and accept um structured data in uh alternative uh ways to email so that um forms with high volumes or with themes that are more digitally enhanced can develop that um we are also aware that some long forms uh would require kind of saveing return functionality so we're hoping to add that um later this year and integrate that uh with our another GDs product the One login product so that's the digital identity product um as someone in the chat um flaged there is also a lot of um some forms are very complex with um some very complex branching and rooting requirements so we'll be developing that feature um towards the end of next year um and alongside that there will also be the preview and Version Control um where we um where departments have even more control um of how forms evolve and versioning and and previews so um hopefully that would kind of unlock a lot of those key fundamental features to to ensure that the majority of the forms um out there can be transformed with Cav forms now this is the road map but there are a few things that I didn't cover um which are worth considering and will be doing over the next year as well so first and foremost um it's it's kind of non-negotiable now that we have live forms um published on G forms and going forward um our top priority is running a secure accessible and available platform um and this includes multiple things from kind of running um external penetration testing and internal information assurances um making sure we are always sucess ible to uh wak 2.2 um and and and making sure that we have a highly available platform that meets the needs of our form uh creators as well as form fillers I the citizens um we work really closely with our users and with departments that use us um and in the future we want to continue working um wherever possible in Partnership um as you saw the kind of dvsa example as well um so that would continue and we're very open to kind of you're reaching out and and helping us shape uh things as we go along um a lot of our features are already really great as you saw from Holly's uh present um demo however there is more um iteration Improvement we need to do to make sure they're even more powerful and kind of more um integr with scale and there was a question about local authorities in the meeting chat we are aware this is a great product and everyone wants to use it um we we are we want to open up to the wider public sector um however we want to make sure that we first have a scalable product for central government as this is our core mandate here at GDs so we are um going to open up to the Wi public sector but probably will not be a this calendar year thing um however um stay tuned uh look at our um public road map which is on our product page um for any kind of changes to what we said and and how we are going to approach it okay um thanks everyone with your questions I'm going to hand back over to Amanda um to wrap up thanks thank you to all of you for joining us today and you asked some really insightful and engaging questions it's great to see everybody taking an interest um in this new product thank you to our speakers Holly James John and Arena I I hope you all found today's webinar useful don't forget to sign up for more information on our forms product page which is gov.uk fors and click the get started button to sign up for a trial account I truly look forward to seeing more of your forms live on gov.uk in the future thanks so much for coming