Form Builder application lets service users build simple forms to free up development time
The challenge
Adur & Worthing Councils refers to two local government authorities, Adur District Council and Worthing Borough Council, operating under a joint management structure to serve the communities in West Sussex. As mature low-code users, they’ve been on a mission to make digital change a people-centred journey, with new digital services that offer great user experiences for their citizens.
Having experimented with teams across the council to build on their low-code platform, Liberty Create, they had difficulties managing their comprehensive change process, control measures and development support beyond the core digital team.
Freeing the Digital Team and reducing liaison time
The council wanted a way to easily enable service teams to develop and maintain their own forms and apps, with no development experience and very little training. Based on so many successes over the last few years, the Digital Team are constantly in demand to create new forms for citizens to use to access services for various departments. The logic behind developing new forms is quite simple so the team decided to try to free themselves and reduce the need for liaison between services and the digital team, they decided to use low-code to build a no-code form builder app, called Form Builder.
“We’ve designed the form builder so we can also triage citizen requests to deflect common queries. Service users can build and maintain their own forms, and configure more specialist apps, with no training or access to the Build Studio. We can maintain our data and design standards and consistency. We can also integrate with a range of third-party platforms.”
James Coleman
Lead Digital Developer, Digital, Adur & Worthing Councils
The solution
After a 10-minute introduction to Form Builder, service teams at Adur & Worthing can be up and running. Once happy with their form, they can build a prototype, with multiple form administrators.
Once ready to publish, they can push the form to live — knowing it complies to specific layouts and styles, whilst meeting best practice standards. Form Builder also enables integrations with different systems.
Using Form Builder, forms are ready faster because the correspondence between teams is reduced. Here’s an example: Adur & Worthing developed a Grants form in 2020 which took a week of liaison to scope, followed by a few days’ build before the form was ready.
In 2023, with a new Grant programme on the way, the Service Team built out the prototype themselves. The form was ready in under a week — and the Digital Team was free to work on more demanding builds.
Form builder has enabled Service Teams to quickly build out forms that they need to create or adjust. With minimal guidance and approval time required, the Digital Team has more capacity to work on new systems and larger or more complex applications.
This means that the Digital Team can power through the list of tasks even faster.
Adur & Worthing added in Analytics to Form Builder to capture feedback from customers as they’re filling in forms.
This enables the Digital Team to look at anonymised data against the form. If they see a pattern or a specific issues, they use statistics to advise the Service Team where a change to the form might be beneficial.
Adur & Worthing introduced automatic integration with existing systems, such as document management, case management and email without any additional work.
“With Liberty Create it was so easy to set up the initial process and to add what would be a complex app if it was done outside of low-code. Also, as the integrations are so easy to set up, it means we are not reliant on any third party and additional costs, which is a great advantage over an off the shelf form builder.”
James Coleman
Lead Digital Developer, Digital, Adur & Worthing Councils
The result
Super-fast development of forms and simple applications
Intuitive user interface for easy training and adoption of Service Teams
Service users have ownership of developments and adjustments to their own forms
Digital Team gain capacity to work on complex large projects
Data and design standards are maintained.
Hear it for yourself
Depth of low-code experience
Building a builder-tool for people with no coding experience at all is an art. This innovative application is a relatively simple concept, but it could easily be over complicated. This application was built very quickly – a credit to the low-code experience of the Adur & Worthing Digital Team. They continue to develop the app, adding a no-code application management configurer to enable teams to assign and process forms submitted via the Form Builder and also set up their own checklists, message templates and stages.
Adur & Worthing have developed great depth of experience with low-code, enabling Innovation-as-a-Service for the council’s evolving requirements, and tackling a large number of issues including improving tenant services, agile development for waste and improved asset management – Adur & Worthing low-code journey.
Impact
Faster
build of simple forms
More time
for complex application builds
Easy UI
clean, effective form
Building applications. Fast.
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