Challenge & Research Goals
The team was tasked with testing e-form prototypes for a large government project funded through a recovery and resilience plan. The project involved creating digital forms that citizens would use to request various social insurance payments.
The challenge was unique: while the team wanted to create user-friendly digital services, they were constrained by strict legislative requirements that dictated specific terminology and structure.
The legislation defined what had to be included in the forms and how everything should be labeled. We tried to persuade stakeholders to consider alternative wording, but they often insisted that everything had to follow the exact legislative requirements.
The forms needed to serve a diverse audience, from young people with no knowledge of retirement planning to seniors actively preparing for retirement.Â
The team needed to ensure that complex government terminology and processes would be understandable across all age groups.
This topic affects everyone. From young people who haven't thought about retirement at all, to middle-aged people who are starting to consider it but still see it as far in the future, all the way to those 60 and older.
Solution
The team developed a comprehensive testing approach using UXtweak’s Prototype Testing tool to validate their Figma prototypes before development.
They recruited 15 respondents across five age groups (18-30, 30-35, 35-45, 45-60, and 60+), ensuring representation from all target demographics.Â
The testing combined two methodologies:
- 6 partially moderated sessions where researchers observed respondents in person, noting reactions and capturing immediate feedback
- 9 unmoderated sessions conducted remotely with screen recordings for analysis
The team followed their established methodology for analyzing results:
- Collected all comments from both direct respondent feedback in UXtweak and observations during moderated sessions
- Categorized similar feedback under common themes
- Ranked categories by frequency to prioritize issues
- Prepared detailed test protocols with findings and recommendations
Key categories that emerged included:
- Terminology and meaning of terms: Users consistently struggled to understand complex legislative language and technical terms required by law.
- Functionality requests: Respondents wanted additional features like the ability to attach documents directly within specific form steps.
- Attribute alignment: Users did not understand why some form fields were aligned in a certain order and questioned the logical order of the information.
- Visual differentiation of fields and their editability: It wasn’t clear to users which fields contained pre-filled data from government systems versus which fields they needed to complete themselves.
Outcome
The testing revealed that the biggest value came from identifying terminology issues. Users consistently reported not understanding legislation-specific terms that stakeholders insisted were mandatory due to legislation.
This was the biggest added value because we were able to show the stakeholders that, look, our users are not familiar with these terms.
Armed with test data, the team successfully persuaded stakeholders to implement user-centered improvements:
After the tests, we showed the stakeholders what people actually said. We explained that users didn’t understand some of the terminology and that we should improve it. And in cases where the legislation won’t let us change the question itself, we can still use a tooltip to clarify what it means.
The data also indicated that the order of some attributes needed to be adjusted, because users expected them to be arranged differently.
We had spent a lot of time discussing the order of the address fields. The testing revealed what users actually expected — and it wasn’t just about the address; the same applied to the personal data section. Once we had the data, we were able to adjust the form accordingly.
The final iterated prototype incorporated:
- Explanatory tooltips for complex legislative terms
- Reorganized form attributes following logical user mental models
- Improved visual hierarchy between editable and pre-filled fields
By using concrete user feedback from UXtweak, the team successfully balanced strict legislative requirements with genuine user needs, creating government e-forms that are both compliant and user-friendly.
