The design of a form must make decisions in what absolutely must be conveyed, yet continue to acknowledge all other outlying options. The form seeks to operate on binaries: yes/no, correct/incorrect, affirmation/denial—yet they must still acknowledge the fluidity that can exist behind an answer and a question. How then, is the success of the form evaluated? If a user leaves a question blank or incorrectly fills out a box, has the form failed, or is there still value that can be extracted?

The government form acknowledges its user only to the extent that they are an output of information to be recorded. The Form 1040 U.S. Individual Income Tax Return, in particular, is filled out by over 120 million taxpayers every year. The complexity of the topic that the form is tasked with explaining to its user has created and sustained an entire industry of tax preparation companies, e-filing systems, tax software, and accountants. Yet each year, a collective total of 1.35 billion hours are spent on filing individual taxes and 17% of taxpayers fail to comply with the tax code in some way.[1] [2] With the scope and range of users as well as the wealth of data collection riding on the success of these forms, it is about time that government forms acknowledge and strive for human-centric designs.