Building our Digital Appraisal forms

Over the past year we have been exploring turning some our existing document-based HR forms into digital forms as part of the staff led London Councils Challenge work that explored ways, we could improve the organisation. The digital appraisal form is the most complex of these forms and one of the forms that impacts most users.

What we’ve done so far

Early exploration — turning our word document into an online for using JotForm

We took an early stab at just turning the existing word document into an online form to quickly see how it would work and what our users thought of it. We tested this initially and found it worked to a limited extent. The biggest issues were overall administration, it proved difficult for managers to keep track of submission where they had multiple direct reports. It was also difficult for staff completing the form to save and pick up where they left off from at at a later date. There was also an issue with the form needing to go back and forth between employee and manager that JotForm was never intended to facilitate. We knew we would have to look at building something that met our specific needs.

Documenting our early finding and doing more research

We pulled together our early findings and shared them with our intranet developers, Panlogic who had experience building forms in Drupal that needed to go back and forth between users and required different levels of authentication. Building the form in our existing Drupal powered in intranet would also make it easier to administer for managers who had a high number of direct reports and for human resources colleagues to manage development needs. We worked with Panlogic to talk to users of the forms to confirm what we already thought we knew and get answers for the parts we weren’t sure about.

Prioritizing user needs showing off our prototype

Once we had clarity about the needs of the various users, we set about prioritizing them. We used the Moscow Method to define what the forms must have, should have, could have and won’t have. Panlogic used this information to create a prototype which we used to explain the features to stakeholders and solicit feedback.

What next?

We have now kicked off the project and Panlogic have begun development work. Last week they shared with us and early look at their visual designs. Over the next month they will complete development over the course of two sprints.

After each sprint we will share their progress along with some more screenshots.

The end of year appraisal form will be available at the end of November. If you are interested in hearing more about our work with forms in Drupal, drop me a line in the comments below.