FormSite

Release (5/6/2012)

• New Calculations feature.
• New Running Total item for Order Forms.
• Send Notifications from the Summary Table.

New Calculations Feature

Have you ever needed your form to calculate a value based on a user's input? With our new Calculations feature, your form can now do this.

For example, if you have a text field for "length" and a text field for "width", you can set up an equation that multiplies these fields together to calculate a user's square footage value.

Calculations can handle any combination of mathematical operations: addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. You can also use Calculations to customize Order Form prices and Scoring points.

New Running Total Item

Our new Running Total item allows you to add running totals to your Order Forms. Sometimes you may want users to immediately see their current order total, without having to first complete the remainder of your form. This item is optional; the final itemized order total is still always displayed on the Order Review page, after the last page of your form.

Send Notifications from the Summary Table

In addition to being able to send a custom email of current results from the Summary Table, you can now also send Notifications. This is a great way to share results with new people or to re-send a lost or deleted email.

Coolest Phone Call in 14 Years of FormSite

I've got a cool story to tell. No, it wasn't the Google calling to buy us out. It was early this year and I was feeling great about all we've got lined up for 2012 at FormSite. I was in my office answering email and listening to music. Since I have a private office, I often work with my music turned up pretty loud. I was listening to "Party Rock Anthem" by LMFAO when the phone rang. My kids love the song "Party Rock" and it was one of my "money" songs that helped push me through finishing Chicago Marathon in 2011. I would say it was probably my favorite song at the time my phone was ringing.

I go to pick up the ringing phone and I accidentally drop my phone headset. Scrambling to pick up the headset and get it adjusted, I don't have time to hit the mute button on my music. I answer the phone "Hello this is Randy" while "Party Rock" is blaring in the background. I hit the mute button and the guy on the other end of the phone says, "This is RedFoo from LMFAO." I think to myself, "yeah, yeah, right. This guy must be extremely quick witted." We get to talking and he is talking about how he is using FormSite for his different businesses. The guy I am talking to is 100% business. I'm thinking to myself, this might actually be RedFoo. After about 5 minutes, I stop the conversation and I say, "You really are RedFoo from LMFAO?" He says, "yeah, yeah" and we continue our business conversation.

You would think a conversation with RedFoo would be about bottles and models, but we were talking web security, venture capital and music apps. Anyway, as the conversation closed, I was still not 100% sure it was RedFoo as my friends have pulled off some pretty good jokes on me in the past. I ask RedFoo to send a tweet to his 250k followers. RedFoo agreed to tweet as an experiment to see what kind of traffic spike FormSite would get from his followers. RedFoo tweeted right after we hung up and we saw a nice traffic spike on both FormSite and our Twitter account. Thanks RedFoo!

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.