In the form design section of my Content and User Experience Strategy I have this:
Introducing the form and guidance on how to complete it
Consideration should be given as to whether this is a form that any given user is likely to use repeatedly, or whether the form will be used only once or twice by an individual user, as well as the (necessary) complexity of the form itself when designing the supporting introductory and guidance content for the form.
What am I getting at here?
It's my view that in too many places on too many council websites, too many of us seem to think our users are completely useless.
My go-to example of this is the number of council websites where the Report Missed Bin Collection form is preceded by at least a screen full of text telling the user they should check their collection date before reporting (as if a user who's lived in their house for 10 years wanting to report a missed collection on Tuesday might have unwittingly forgotten that their bin day is Wednesday), telling them in detail to check what goes in what bin before reporting, and telling them that the reason the collection was missed was almost certainly their fault, or their neighbour's fault, or the weather's fault, or Donald Trump's fault, or whatever, and then at the bottom of further text treating the user with contempt there is a 'and if you really must tell us your bins weren't collected and you're convinced it's not your fault, here's the link to the form'.
I also see pages on sites with detailed instructions for how to place a pin on a map, detailed instructions for how to take a picture with your mobile phone, whatever - you name an activity that there's a possibility that the user might be doing for the first time in their lives, and there's almost certainly a council website which has the instructions for how to do that thing written for the benefit of the person who is indeed doing it for the first time in their life, right there before any of the site's thousands of users can, in fact, do that thing.
Often when I've challenged a request to add this kind of nonsense to a page myself, the reply I've been given has been 'but the user needs to read this before they complete the form'.
Really?
Does a user really need to read that a pothole may have been caused because the roads have been 'subject to freezing or exceptionally wet conditions' before they can report its existence?
Or more to the point, the more text we load at the top of a form, or load above the link to a form, the less likely it is the user will read it, and the more likely it is the user will just skim past it grumbling to themselves, and if there actually was anything genuinely essential for them to read amongst that padding, the more likely it is they'll miss it.
It's true, we do have to account for a wide range of capabilities amongst our users, and one of the stories I often tell is of when I’d built the bespoke content management system for a certain magazine; I was in a support email dialogue with a user about their difficulty using a temporary password they'd been given to access the free sample content, which ended with them saying 'I don't know how to type the little dot above the i in the password'. On council websites by nature of the fact it’s our responsibility to serve everybody, we are going to get proportionally more users whose confidence and experience using technology - even in 2025, 18 years after the introduction of the first iPhone - is low, and we do have a responsibility to help these users along the way.
But here's the thing - long-winded instructions you're making users read (or rather, scroll past) every single time they use the form, they're not going to be helpful for the user who lacks confidence in their abilities. If anything they're going to make the nervous user even more nervous about using the online service.
So indeed, where guidance and context is going to be helpful for the user - or even interesting to our cohorts of users who are genuinely interested enough in council services to want to know that 'we carry out 114,500 gully cleansing operations each year' (does House MD perform those operations?), remember the Content Onion principle and put that supporting information after the Call to Action link to the form itself.
And if you do have forms which are sufficiently complicated that sufficient users will benefit from some extra instructions, keep those instructions brief, and conceptually to the side of the form rather than in front of it.