These checklists have been developed for people working in central government sector organizations – that is departments, executive agencies and non-departmental public bodies. We hope that it may also be useful to other parts of the public sector, especially local authorities and NHS bodies.

Our key aim is to provide detailed guidance for officials who have direct responsibility for reviewing how their organization seeks information from customers or citizens by means of paper forms, online applications or via call centres. By 'customers' we mean a whole range of people (such as 'taxpayers', 'service users', 'people seeking licenses', 'benefit claimants' and so on) who deal with government.

By working through the detailed checklists for each of these three methods of communication, you will get practical advice on assessing how easy your current forms are for customers to complete.

Three separate checklists are included here:

• For paper-based forms.
  (In addition, we include some supplementary questions for downloadable PDF forms, which have their own complications.)
• For online forms
• For phone-based forms

We recommend that you look through the guidance provided with each checklist (also always available under HELP in the top right corner) and then move on to the checklists themselves. You can also find more information about the background to the checklists from the About this Guidance page.

If you have previously started to use a checklist and saved your work, you can return to your checklist by specifying the name and pressing the button to load.

Please note the following requirements:

1. The best results are obtained when using Internet Explorer 8 or Mozilla Firefox 3.5. Older versions of these browsers should work too but might give occasional display problems.
2. You need to have Javascript enabled otherwise the checklist will not work.
3. The checklist is optimised for a screen width of 1280 pixels, smaller resolutions do work too but will require more scrolling.

Credits: This tool was programmed by Tobias Escher using Perl and JQuery. Button images from Vacuous Virtuoso's fancy form.