FormSite

Release (2/1/2012)

• New Form Login features allow multiple results per account and compatibility with Order Forms.
• Renovated Notifications page.
• Item settings pages overhauled.

New Form Login Features

For those unfamiliar, our Form Login feature allows form users to create accounts that are associated with their form results. This can be used for save and return functionality or to restrict a form to a list of designated users.

Previously, each user account could only have one associated form result. If the user returned after completing the form, they could only update their original result instead of starting a new one. We have now added an option to allow multiple form results. When a user logs into their account, they can choose from a list of their past results, or choose to start a new result.

Additionally, there is a new option to allow only incomplete results to be updated. Once the user fully completes a result for the first time, it is "done" and no further changes can be made. This allows us to now offer Form Login for use on Order Forms. You can block updating complete results so that once an order has been fully completed, a user can't return and change what they have ordered.

Notifications Page Renovated

One of our most popular features is Notifications, which can send out emails when a form is submitted. As such, we often add new features or functionality to Notifications. You can't argue with that, right? Well, the downside is that over time, our once clean-and-simple design for its settings page ballooned out a little bit, and we felt it got in the way of using all those great new features.

Everyone knows how to send an email, so why is creating a Notification so difficult? That's one of the major questions we looked at, and lo and behold, that was also our answer. Rather than looking at the Notifications page as a group of settings, we re-imagined the page as your common email client. The main changes you'll see involve the page being remodeled to mimic what you would see when sending out an email. Beyond that, we took this time to make a lot of improvements behind the scenes as well.

Item Settings Overhaul

Item settings pages are a core of form building. It is a challenge to keep our huge list of settings organized when new settings are constantly being developed and introduced. After studying our current pages, we made a number of changes to reorganize, speed editing, and increase usability.

To declutter the tops of the pages, we moved each item's description text to a detailed Form Items documentation page. We found that the fancy text formatting options were rarely used, so we hid the Text Editor and its numerous extra buttons— but you can use the "Enable Text Editor" option to quickly enable it. To make yes/no settings more concise and to free more space, we switched to single checkboxes. Lastly, wherever possible, we removed extra separators, borders, and lines.

As you can see in the example above, for the Short Answer item page, we were able to fit the same settings into 30% less space.