The "chaos" of Obamacare just got a little less chaotic. On Tuesday morning, the Obama Administration released its new insurance application, for use on the new health insurance marketplaces. The marketplaces are for people without employer-sponsored coverage, and the idea has always been to make the application process as simple as possible.

Here’s how it’s supposed to work: You go online. You enter some basic information about your family, income, and employment status. You find out what kind of insurance is available to you, whether it’s Medicaid or a regulated private insurance plan. And you find out whether you’re eligible for financial assistance that can reduce the premiums—or, depending on your income, eliminate the premiums altogether.

Sounds great, right? It didn’t look so great in March, when the administration released a prototype of the application. The paper version was 15 pages long for a family of three. That’s not quite as bad as it sounds. The form would have appeared shorter online, and not everybody would have been forced to fill out the entire thing. But many people still found it intimidating—among them, Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar of the Associated Press, who was the first to obtain a copy. “The idea that picking a health insurance plan could be as simple as shopping on the Internet is starting to look like wishful thinking.”

To be fair, buying insurance was never going to be as simple as buying a book on Amazon. How could it be, given that, at the very least, the government needs to know your income and employment status? But administration officials say they listened to the critics and, after the initial release, made a concerted effort to simplify. They consulted with attorneys about which information was absolutely essential and which could be left off. They sought out communications consultants—folks with no particular expertise in health policy—and had them edit the forms. Then they tried out new language on sample groups. Originally, administration officials say, their goal had been to create a form that every single person could use. But that goal made things a lot more complicated, because it meant anticipating every possible contingency. With the revision, administration officials settled on a form that will suffice for the majority of people. (The minority who need to submit extra information—say, because they’re filing their application through a third party—can do so with supplemental forms.)

The result is a new, sleeker application. (You can see the full family version here.) Instead of two questions about spoken language, there is one. A question asking whether people wanted information via text message is gone altogether, because the administration realized nobody was interested in that option. The old form asked people to list, separately, different types of income tax deductions. The new one has one, generic question asking for the total of all deductions. I tried the application myself and it took me less than ten minutes to fill out the whole thing. Apparently that’s pretty average: Administration officials say that, in their tests, the average completion time was seven minutes. And I’m not the only one impressed. Time’s Joe Klein, who was among those criticizing the old application and the first to report on the new one, says the improvement “shows the Administration is alert and flexible and responsive—and, if we’re lucky, may turn out to be innovative in enacting a system that will bring health care to those who haven’t had it before, and lower costs to the self-employed masses who’ve had to go out and buy insurance on their own.”