A form is rarely a moment in isolation — it’s one step in a broader service journey that begins before an end user ever clicks “submit”, and it continues long after. People come to fill out a form with certain expectations and a desired outcome. They might be completing a request or exchanging information or moving a process forward.
To design an end-to-end experience that helps ensure the form feels purposeful and responsive to user needs, you might look to connect form-building with notification-sending. This could make the data collection process more of a two-way interaction that can reassure users and support their overall journey.
The Canadian Digital Service’s Platform Products: GC Forms and GC Notify can work together to send email notifications on form submission for example. This is possible by leveraging the API functionality of each these products. The two APIs can work together, with form submissions or other trigger events automatically sending timely email or text messages.
If someone submits a form (via GC Forms), it is possible for them to automatically receive an email notification (through GC Notify), if desired, to confirm receipt, provide next steps or share relevant updates.
Creating this type of seamless experience would require your team to have a software developer, within your department or agency, to write custom code that programmatically allows forms and notifications to work together:
- Use GC Forms’ API to poll for new responses at a regular interval (e.g. every minute)
2. Use GC Notify’s API to send an email, once a response is received.
