Monitoring Customer Feedback & Implementing Improvements in New Jersey: A FormFest 2025 Profile

In traditional service jobs, customer feedback is easy to come by. (When you mess up a dinner order or overcharge someone for a hotel room, you’re going to hear about it.) In government service—where the job is a thousand different jobs, and the customer is everyone in the state—it’s a little trickier to monitor. 

But it doesn’t have to be. Two years ago, New Jersey’s State Office of Innovation began collecting comments on state websites from a feedback widget asking a single question: Did you find what you were looking for on this page? Often, the answer was no. To date, residents have provided more than 430,000 ratings, 70,000 comments, and 22,000 emails, sparking improvements in everything from website layouts to correspondence. 

Some of those changes were easy, like adding a link to help people locate tax documents for unemployment claims. Others were more complex, like an attempt to streamline an identity verification requirement that resulted in a total website overhaul and a full-scale integration with an outside vendor. Residents approved: “Yes” responses spiked once the updates were in place.

Today, a dedicated team—including Ruthie Nachmany, Ben Turndorf, Katherine B. Nammacher, and Andrew Wong-Crocitto—are working on the next step: Making it easier for state agencies to turn that input into action. Note: New Jersey’s Feedback Widget team also includes Lizzy Zhang and A.J. Hyppolite.

Ruthie Nachmany: A Privilege 

At the beginning, the widget was about testing a theory: If it was easier for residents to share their thoughts, it should be easier to serve them better. But “it also just felt like the right thing to do,” said Nachmany, a product manager and head of the platform team at New Jersey’s State Office of Innovation. 

“People should have a place to tell government what’s working and not working, and it should be easy for public servants to get that feedback and act on it,” she said.

Nachmany worked on the project from its inception, and the widget reflects her passion for helping government use emerging technologies to make people’s lives better.

“It’s such an exciting time in technology, and there is so much opportunity to bring that innovation into government, and help it work better to deliver people the services they need,” she said. “I’m very motivated by having a positive impact on the individuals I interact with, and getting to do work that has a positive impact on the people who interact with that work. It is such a privilege to do this work.”

Katherine B. Nammacher: A Shift in Perspective

Nammacher has worked in government technology for more than a decade,   but she does not say her work is about technology. For her, it’s about people—public servants, and the people they serve.

For that reason, it’s also about feedback, and Nammacher loves feedback.

“Every public servant that I meet is here for public service, and collecting feedback on any website is one of many ways that we get to hear from our residents. And that is, at least for me, so interesting,” she said. “I love getting feedback and looking at this. There’s an almost anthropological side to it, where we’re asking, ‘Hey, what’s your perspective?’ We all experience things differently, and all of those perspectives are valid. It’s the same for any comment that we get.”

Nammacher appreciates different viewpoints. In 2022, she quit her job to travel the continents, allowing her to spend a year observing and exploring other cultures. If she could, she would do that full-time. In a way, her work today is an extension of that.

“I love listening to people’s stories and their unique viewpoints on something. I loved to go around the world collecting those stories,” she said. “I bring that same curiosity and empathy into my own work as a product manager and user researcher.”

Ben Turndorf: Detailed Simplification

Take a look at Ben Turndorf’s reading list and you’ll find many books on extremely specific topics. There’s a guide on New York City’s infrastructure, a history of energy in civilization, and a look at how the invention of the lance possibly gave rise to feudalism. You might describe this as a collection of niche interests, but Turndorf has an easier explanation.

“I’m a huge nerd,” he said. “But being really curious about the nitty-gritty details of how things work has [served me well] in civic tech, when I need to read regulations or go deep on the implications of the law for a program that I’m working on.”

Ironically, those deep dives are usually in service of simplification. Forms are an inescapable fact of government services, but that does not mean they need to be overly complex, according to Turndorf.

“Forms are crucial, but I think the really important thing is to make forms useful. While we haven’t figured out a way to do without forms yet, I actually think the more we can save people from needing to deal with forms—and use data that we already have, or ask fewer questions, or just generally make things simpler for people—the better,” he said.

 “Maybe another way to put this is: government services are really crucial, but specific form implementations themselves aren’t! So, we should be asking ourselves all the time how we can simplify, simplify, simplify, and continually focus on the outcomes,” Turndorf said.

Andrew Wong-Crocitto: Less is More

There is a little-known professional hazard of focusing on form design: Do it long enough and you’ll start to notice that a lot of form design is terrible. 

“I recently applied for a passport for my son, and in his application I had to select his occupation as ‘child,’” Wong-Crocitto said. “I’m still slightly bothered by the ridiculousness of that.”

This was a type of reverse inspiration for Wong-Crocitto, who thinks of design as a way to help things work better—for everyone. In government, where the smallest design changes can have the biggest impact on people’s lives, improvement is largely about keeping things simple.

“Services wouldn’t exist without the ability to communicate information through forms. When a user, resident, or customer engages with a service, the forms should be a natural extension of what it is they’re trying to achieve,” he explained. “The less they have to do to fill them out, the better. Forms should never get in the way or confuse the end user.”

Like all types of communication, forms are a two-way street. For things to work properly, that simplicity has to carry through to the government side too, Wong-Crocitto said. A form—or in this case, a widget—can generate reams of feedback, but it won’t mean anything if employees are not equipped to interpret it.

“We’re currently figuring out what the most impactful next step will be,” Wong-Crocitto said. “We have a number of opportunities, like trying to improve data quality or increasing the adoption rate of the widget, but … we’re trying to figure out first how to make the data more actionable,” he said. “In our conversations so far, we’ve been hearing that collecting the data is great, but it’s hard for people to meaningfully incorporate the data into their work.”