Lessons from export form makeovers

Transforming agricultural exporting means re-thinking every experience in the 
supply chain. Content designer, Marnie McLean, explains why forms are a small 
but mighty item on our transformation agenda.  

Users told us that our export forms didn't spark much joy. 

So we asked “how might we improve them?” 

To make it easier for Australian exporters to get goods overseas, we’re building the Export Service, a single place to manage exporting transactions. As we build it, we’re looking for improvements to every export-related process, resource, and interaction along the way.   

Taking on user feedback, we had lots of ideas for how we’d simplify forms. Specifically, the paper forms involved in becoming ready to export. 

We wrote about improving our first form, EX26b, in a previous blog. We were able to simplify it so that people get the job done as easily as possible. Here are our lessons learned from transforming a form into seamless digital services.  

Don’t lift and shift – re-imagine 

EX26b (Application to vary an establishment registration and/or approved arrangement) was a 10-page paper form that performed lots of different tasks. Users had to understand which bits of the form to fill out for the thing they were trying to get done. 

We deliberately didn’t ‘lift and shift’ each question from the paper form to a digital form. Taking this approach might have improved some of the user experience, like helping users avoid making accidental mistakes, but we would have missed a bigger opportunity to simplify. 

Instead, we broke the form apart and re-imagined it through the lens of the tasks a user might need to do. This helped us drop entire groups of questions, like asking a user for the details of their business when they’re already signed in. It allowed us to put these questions in context with simpler guidance. 

Break it down with a multi-disciplinary team 

Experts from legal, policy, digital and registration worked together to remove as much complexity as possible from the resulting service. 

We found many opportunities to simplify the content and questions in the new digital service. We worked closely with our colleagues in legal and the regulatory area to make sure that the simpler content was factually and legally correct. 

The result of this collaboration is a stripped-back experience of the form, where users only see the fields and information necessary for them to complete their task.  

Give users information when they need it 

The joy of a digital service is that you can step people through bite-sized pieces of information, rather than presenting them with multiple pages of text at once.  

The digital service helps users through the application process by telling them what they’ll need to complete the form and including more detailed information if it’s needed as they progress. 

You can see this in the information provided in the opening screen for EX26b: 

Or in the detail included when we ask for a person’s legal name: 

Build on the things that work 

Users are saving an average of 51 minutes per transaction by using the re-imagined version of EX26b over the paper form.

Building on this success, we’ve been working on a makeover for the EX26a form: the process to register new export establishments. 

Research so far showed that many applications for new export establishments often miss all the required information. This slows down the registration time, as we have emails back-and-forth before we can process the application. 

We’ve given this process the same treatment that EX26b received, and users will soon be able to use the Export Service to apply to register a new establishment. 

Help us make forms better

We’ll be asking people to trial the process of registering a new export establishment in the Export Service later this month. Instead of filling out a form, users will be asked to navigate through the process represented as a digital service.

If you manage an export business and would like to be one of the first to try the service, send our team a message at [email protected].