This guidance was developed from an earlier checklist covering only paper forms, issued by the NAO in 2004 following research that led to a report called Difficult Forms: How government agencies interact with citizens, which has been widely used in central government. We are very grateful to the many civil servants and public officials who have given us feedback on that original checklist.

This version works in essentially the same way, but draws on very recent research and good practice, including the May 2009 NAO report on Department for Work and Pensions: Communicating with Customers, and on consultation with government departments and customer groups in summer 2009. The new versions draw on extensive work with focus groups, experiments with users completing online forms, and close observations in call centres during 2008-9, as well as earlier focus groups conducted in 2004. All the features included have been identified in research work as those most commonly causing problems for customers.

In order to aid with the application of the checklist an online toolkit was developed that allows rating paper and online forms as well as phone-based forms. It automatically calculates the difficulty score for a form and allows comparison with the difficulty scores of other forms.

The guide and the toolkit were launched on 13 January 2010 in an event at the Institute for Government with Sir Leigh Lewis, Permanent Secretary, Department for Work and Pensions (more details)

All the reports mentioned above were undertaken for the National Audit Office by a team from the LSE Public Policy Group led by Professor Patrick Dunleavy, and the Oxford Internet Institute, led by Professor Helen Margetts. The combined team included Tobias Escher, Sofia Goldchluk, Stephane Reissfelder, Jane Tinkler and Ed Towers. We would also like to thank Liane Hinds and David Raraty from the NAO for their help and expertise on the checklists.