Designing a dynamic internal forms portal on PowerApps for staff compliance declarations.
Overview
The Department of Regional NSW needed a better way to handle sensitive internal compliance forms — the kind that staff are legally required to complete, but that historically lived in clunky, disconnected processes.
I designed a Dynamic Forms Portal built within the department's SharePoint intranet using Microsoft PowerApps and the Power Platform, giving internal staff a single, structured place to submit compliance declarations.
The Challenge
Government compliance forms have a reputation for being dense, ambiguous, and easy to complete incorrectly. For the department, this created downstream problems: incomplete submissions, back-and-forth clarification, and records that didn't meet audit requirements.
The design challenge was to work within strict legal and business requirements — the form structure and fields were largely non-negotiable — while making the experience as clear and frictionless as possible for the people filling them out.
The Forms
The portal covers four core compliance areas:
Conflict of Interest — declarations where staff identify potential conflicts between personal interests and their role
Gifts, Benefits & Hospitality — records of offers received and how they were handled
Secondary Employment — approval requests for staff working outside the department
Private Interests — broader disclosure of personal interests relevant to public duties
Each form needed to reflect the specific legal obligations of that declaration type while remaining clear and usable for everyday staff — not just compliance specialists.
My Approach
Because the forms were constrained by legal requirements, the design work focused less on what information to collect and more on how to present it clearly.
Progressive disclosure — breaking each form into logical sections so staff weren't confronted with a wall of fields at once, and showing only what's relevant based on previous answers.
Plain language — rewriting field labels and guidance text to be direct and jargon-free, without changing the legal meaning of what was being asked.
Validation and error prevention — building in real-time validation so users were alerted to issues before submitting, rather than receiving a rejection after the fact.
Consistent UI patterns — establishing a consistent visual language across all four forms within the PowerApps and SharePoint environment, so staff switching between form types didn't have to relearn the interface.
Outcome
The portal centralised four previously fragmented compliance processes into a single, accessible intranet tool — reducing manual handling for staff and providing the department with structured, auditable records.
Due to NDA restrictions, screens and specific outputs are not shown here.
Reflection
Designing within a government compliance context is a different kind of constraint. The content isn't yours to change — the legal requirements are fixed — so the craft sits entirely in clarity, structure, and language. It also requires close collaboration with legal and business stakeholders who may not think in design terms, which means translating between "what the law requires" and "what a staff member on a Monday morning will actually understand."
Working in PowerApps and the Power Platform also meant designing within the boundaries of the tool — learning where the platform gives you flexibility and where it doesn't, and making good decisions within those limits.