Jotform 3.0 Sneak Peaks: Form Builder Overview

Jotform 3.0 Sneak Peaks: Form Builder Overview

While our team is working on the remaining 104 Internet Explorer bugs, I will sneak out and write another Jotform 3.0 preview. 🙂 Today, I would like to cover the main features on Jotform 3.0 Form Builder.

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We have many competitors. They are really good at marketing. I don’t really care or look up what they are doing. What I care about is making the best online form builder ever. If we can just keep doing that, I am sure our user base will grow and some of them will keep supporting us by buying the Premium edition.

You might say “best” is a relative term. It can mean many things. So, let me explain. When I say “best”, I mean three things:

  1. Ease of use
  2. Flexibility
  3. Features

These are opposite powers all pulling in a different direction. It is very very hard to accomplish a good balance. This is how Microsoft Word and Photoshop became so successful. And this is also why most software products fail.

On Jotform 3.0 our goal was to improve our product so that we advance on these three fronts while still not losing the balance to a single side. To accomplish that we had to rewrite the form builder from scratch. I don’t want to get into technical details, but for example, our previous form builder simply generated HTML code and added to the innerHTML while the new rewrite directly works on the DOM. This was required to provide more flexibility.

Before I bore you more with technical details, let’s take a look at some more screenshots of Jotform 3.0 form builder. Here is what the new form builder looks like when you first open:

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During usability tests we found out that having a default form can cause confusion for new users when they open the form builder for the first time. So, Jotform now simply opens with a blank space on the form editor. Beautiful, isn’t it?

Toolbars Overview:

Right side of the toolbar contains commonly used elements such as Save, Preview and Undo/Redo.

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Toolbars are context sensitive. So, they can change when you are doing different things.

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Toolboxes Overview:

Jotform 3.0 has 40 form field types. We categorized these field types into 5 categories:

  1. Form Tools
  2. Quick Tools
  3. Survey Tools
  4. Power Tools
  5. Payment Tools
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Menus Overview:

On Jotform 3.0, you can right click on any question to get a context sensitive menu.

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Thank you for listening. I will try to keep posting more sneak peaks while we get ready for the release. Stay tuned to learn about our new Email Wizard, Themes, Integrated Payments, awesome new Reporting features and more.

By the way, those 104 Internet Explorer bugs: 90% of them are in the “does not look right on IE” category. Our team is unbelievably good when it comes to writing cross browser bug free code. They seldom find bugs on the main functionality. 🙂

AUTHOR
Aytekin Tank is the founder and CEO of Jotform and the bestselling author of Automate Your Busywork. A developer by trade but a storyteller by heart, he writes about his journey as an entrepreneur and shares advice for other startups. He loves to hear from Jotform users. You can reach Aytekin from his official website aytekintank.com.

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