Our New Roadmap List!

We’ve noticed that our feature request forum has been getting quite a work out lately. Because we can’t attack every new idea simultaneously, we’ve created a little Roadmap To Do List on our blog to communicate to our users what we’re focusing on (and finishing) behind the scenes. This is not to say features won’t show up that’s not on this list (we’re adding and tweaking stuff all the time) or be completed out of order (you’ll notice the Submit API still isn’t worked out). We’re just hoping this will give everyone a broad overview of our vision and priorities for Wufoo.

To learn more about a feature we’re working on in the list, just click on the question mark beside it and a little description will hopefully convince you that it’ll make Wufoo a better product because of it. And for you impatient types out there, remember these features are being worked on in addition to other activities like answering support requests, pulling pranks on Ryan, fixing bugs, spreading the word, optimizing code and making sure everyone is having fun.

Photo by Brian Solis

Hey everyone, just got back from San Francisco where I had a blast showing off Wufoo in a round of Blitz Demonstrations at the Office 2.0 Conference. I had a lot of fun watching some of the other companies do their best with the constraints. It was an interesting challenge compressing Wufoo’s essence into a five minute demo but we did alright. Out of 15 presentations, we were excited to take home 2nd Place for best demo!

The best part of the conference was meeting all the awesome people I’ve interacted with face to face. I had some great conversations with Avi and Andrew of DabbleDB and the Bezinger brothers, Tim and Brian. For those not in the know, the Benzingers are identical twins and only 19. They have some pretty neat stuff up their sleeves and I look forward to see what they’re going to be putting out in the next few months.

I was also pleased to finally meet Ismael Ghalimi, who put together a really impressive event in a very short amount of time. Here’s some Wufoo trivia for you: Ismael was Wufoo’s very first beta tester. After some begging on his end and disclaimers about “sketchiness” on ours, Ismael used Wufoo to take submissions for his Office 2.0 directory. There’s not doubt that he’s passionate about this space and we’re glad he invited us to come out there and be a part of it.

In other news, Chris got married last weekend and Ryan fullfilled his duties as best man by taking part in some pretty ridiculous debauchery. That does it for the news, we’re finally settled into post-conference, post-Honeymoon and post-hangover mode and ready to start kicking it again. Get ready for an awesome week!

When it comes to filling out a form, you want your users to spend less time understanding your form and more time filling it out. Over at UXMatters, Matteo Penzo wrote a fantastic article detailing the results of some eye-tracking studies he’s done on the impact of label placement in relation to form elements.

“Input elements should be organized in logical groups so that your brain can process the form layout in chunks of related fields.”

Obviously the closer you have the label to the input element, the less fixated the user is on trying to figure out the association between what the form is asking for and the task that needs to be accomplished. Since there’s a pretty good relationship between cognitive processing and eye fixation, the lower the fixation the faster the field is being processed. The big question, however, is if it’s faster to put the label to the side or above the field. Here’s a quick overview of some of the results.

• Labels to Left and Aligned Left : 500ms
• Labels to the left and Aligned Right : 170ms for Experts and 240ms for Novice
• Labels Sitting Directly Above the Field : 50ms

What’s surprising (even to us) is that putting the labels directly above the field (like we do with Wufoo form layouts) is almost 5X faster for the user to process than putting the labels next to the field.

“Placing a label right over its input field permitted users to capture both elements with a single eye movement. Also, if a label indicated data that was very familiar to users—for example, their first name or family name—users did not fixate on the label separately to read it.”

Definitely head over there and check out the results for yourself and let us know what you think. It’s a great read and I really appreciate the guys at UXMatters for taking the time and resources to share the results for free. Thanks to studies like these, hopefully, form designers will have more information in their arsenal to build forms that are inherently faster to understand and fill out.

In regards to how this will impact Wufoo designed forms, we’ve always been fans of the label above layout and since a majority of the forms created on our system are short forms, we’ll continue to leave this placement as our default layout. We are, however, closing in on providing a way to allow users to attach their own CSS file on their Wufoo forms so they can customize these layouts to their heart’s content. Currently, we’re working on providing the appropriate CSS ids and class hooks to give designers the most amount of flexiblity when this feature goes out. Any suggestions or requests on this feature are always welcome.