User can fill a form to ask questions to agency about askgovsg HOT 1 CLOSED

Changing this to a form where a user fills up gives us the following benefits

• As a user is typing the question, we can show other already answered questions (like StackOverflow), so that user can refer to those and get their answers faster.

To my mind, this veers towards Phase 3 and can be counted as scope creep.

We can perhaps reuse the search components to anticipate what the user might be asking for, but we would still need to build out the backend to route the submitted request to the agency.

Alternatively, the form could just generate the corresponding e-mail to send to the agency + ourselves, but this would oblige the user to go through an extra step to send the e-mail, which isn't good UX

• We can also store what questions users are asking for further analysis (e.g. are these new questions that we should get agencies to create FAQs for, or existing questions such that users are not searching)

As an alternative to storing the questions, we could have ourselves cc'd in the mail sent to agencies with the appropriate parameters added to the mailto: link.

Proposed iterations

I hence propose the following iterations to get to the functionality we want:

• We will initially add a cc to ourselves for the mailto: link generated for the agency. done
• A second iteration will present a form to the user to fill up a form that would generate the mail as described above
• Subsequently, we build out the backend needed to:
  • Initially route the form submission into e-mails, which we then replace with...
  • ... Hold the request as a question to be answered in the application itself

from askgovsg.