It began as an ad hoc request from a government agency officer who wanted to solve a paper form problem.

The officer was spending hours collating the sheets of paper and manually entering the data into a spreadsheet.

Looking to save time, the officer approached Mr Leonard Loo, 27, a product manager at the Government Technology Agency (GovTech), a year ago.

Mr Loo, who has a background in coding, put together a bare-bones solution in a week, helping to digitise the form and writing a simple script to convert the responses into a spreadsheet.

This was how Mr Loo and his team developed FormSG, a self-service form builder and data collation tool now being used by more than 50 government agencies to create forms for their citizen services.

Last week, Mr Loo told The New Paper: "As we got more and more agencies (asking for it), we realised some things could be abstracted, so we focused on those that were more useful to the larger pool."

Mr Loo will be sharing this development process at Stack 2018, GovTech's first developer conference.

It will be held at the Suntec Singapore Convention and Exhibition Centre on Oct 2 and 3.

Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong will be the guest of honour.

GovTech user experience designer Alishia Chiang, 27, who will be speaking at Stack, said it was important the products and platforms that GovTech develops give value to users.

One of her recent projects was the Housing Board's online resale portal launched in January. HDB wanted to streamline its resale transaction process, and the portal halved the time from 16 weeks to eight and cut the number of physical appointments needed from two to one.

To understand the process, Ms Chiang visited HDB's customer service counters regularly to observe how its officers interacted with customers and conducted face-to-face interviews and focus groups.

Ms Chiang said: "We were trying to map a physical face-to-face appointment to an online experience so the challenge was how do we (replace) that human touch. You need to make sure that users don't feel lost."

Mr Loo added: "Personal failure to me is if I roll something out on time but it is not something that people need.

"Even with negative feedback we think of it as success, or at least potential success, because then we have something to build on top of."