Framing the Triangle: A FormFest 2024 Profile

Paul Pistorius and Julian Rösner: Framing the triangle

Paul Pistorius and Julian Rösner are used to multitasking. That’s the deal at DigitalService, the central digitalization group for Germany’s federal government. One day, they’re creating an online portal for legal aid applications; the next, they’re navigating tax forms. The secret to mastering that diverse portfolio? A basic understanding of the forms themselves, directly from the people who use them—all of the people. Or, as Paul and Julian refer to it, “the triangle of success.”

“We always want to look at the three sides,” said Paul. “There are the citizens who fill out the form, the civil servants who process them, and the owner of the form, which is often not one department, but several.”

Sketching out the triangle is easier than bringing it to life. The various stakeholders are usually siloed, and convening them for an open conversation is often difficult. (Typically, it’s easier to talk to each group individually, then bring them together for a presentation on the bigger picture.) But it’s crucial to the improvement process.

“I now look at other projects and say, ‘The reason they are not proceeding is because they are not talking to certain stakeholders,’” said Paul. “It was always, and remains, a fight to be able to include the right people. But there is no way forward without it.”

Paul Pistorius: A systematic cycle

Paul Pistorius is sort of new to DigitalService, but then DigitalService is, itself, sort of new. The agency was created just four years ago, roughly 1.5 years before Paul signed on as a user experience and user interface designer. (His first day fell near the end of the pandemic and the beginning of the war in Ukraine.) It’s a bit like the government version of a startup, with a small team and work that spans the gamut. Paul thrives on that variety, moving seamlessly from project to project on the way to implementing system-wide simplifications. The specifics are always changing, but that makes sense, given the clientele. After all, no two agencies work exactly the same way.

“This is like so many different tasks deriving from working the way we work, and that’s what I really love.”

He’s less systematic in his off hours, which he spends on his bicycle on the roads outside of Berlin (and sometimes farther).

Julian Rösner: Walking the walk

As a senior software engineer, Julian Rösner focuses primarily on back-end modifications that simplify forms for users. But the process itself is often quite complex. Take a recent tax project that aimed to remove redundant or unnecessary questions from an income declaration form—a straightforward premise that still required statistical analysis and collaboration with both regulators and public servants. Some questions, it turned out, were required under federal tax policy. The form was still streamlined, but the takeaway lesson was that defining the correct set of questions can sometimes be more important than the end design.

“I hope that this will help in the future to change the requirements,” Julian said.

Collaboration comes easily to Julian, who prioritizes empathy in negotiations and loves to understand the ins and outs of complex problems. He came to DigitalService two years ago, two weeks after hearing a guest speaker on a podcast remark that complaints about public services tend to come from people who are employed by the private sector. The environment, and the changing nature of the work, kept him there.

“I stayed because it keeps [being] an interesting challenge and I get to work with ambitious people in a modern workplace that combines having impact and values”

FormFest Session Abstract & Details

International Work on Human-Centered Form Design

Breakout Session | December 4, 2024 | 12:50 PM-1:50 PMET

Learn about human centered form improvements from the City of Reykjavik and the German DigitalService’s form simplification project.

The triangle of success: Involving the right parties in the form design process

Paul Pistorius, Julian Rösner

In order to make forms substantially easier to use, we need to understand—and sometimes change—underlying requirements. We need to understand how forms are processed and why specific requirements exist in the first place. This requires all parties to be involved from the beginning: the legal department owning the requirements, the officials processing the forms and, of course, the users filling out the forms. Often, identifying all the parties and getting them to sit at one table is a tremendous task in itself—but it’s vital for success. With examples from different projects (justice and taxes) we’ll show how we at DigitalService (the German government’s central digitalization unit) improve forms by understanding the requirements on both sides of the screen