Home
Current Stable Version: 1.2.0 (GitHub, npm)
At the present time, the USDS is focusing on higher-impact priorities until it can find a partner interested in turning the library into a generally useful form building tool. As a result, the project is currently receiving minimal updates and maintenance.
Project retrospective and post-Phase-1 status
This library enables you to build web-based forms using React and the JSON Schema standard. Instead of building and configuring your React components from scratch, use this library and guidance to describe the form fields in a JSON Schema configuration file, which will then render the backing React components necessary to build your form.
Originally inspired by Mozilla's react-jsonschema-form library and based on successes at the Department of Veterans Affairs' Vets.gov site, we have created a version specific for building web-based forms styled using the U.S. Web Design System for a consistent look and feel across government.
We maintain the code for several examples in the library itself, including the following Federal forms:
- CMS40B-E: Appication for Enrollment in Medicare Part B
- DS-82: U.S. Passport Renewal Application for Eligible Individuals
- SS-5: Application for Social Security Card
- G-1145: USCIS E-Notification of Application/Petition Acceptance
- 4506-T: Request for Transcript of Tax Return
This repository is proudly listed at Code.gov
To contact the team, please open an issue!
Background
The federal government maintains around 23,000 forms, which are used to carry out its essential functions and provide critical services and benefits. In the case of paper-only forms, workers spend innumerable hours recreating and quality checking handwritten entries. Where digital forms exist, they are often simply fillable PDFs that still require manual processing because the data isn't collected in a format that can be automatically processed. The need to manually process both of these types of forms leads to more than 11.4 billion hours of paperwork annually.
As we have seen in multiple USDS engagements, web-based forms created through user-centered design methods reduce the respondent burden while producing well-structured data to the agencies for ingestion. Additionally, by using a common framework for building these forms, teams have seen a significant reduction in the amount of time required to build a form -- going from 5 months down to 5 days, in one example from the Vets.gov team.