Form and Report Manager Updates

By Chris Campbell · April 14th, 2009

If you logged into Wufoo last week, you probably noticed some big changes to our interfaces for managing your forms and reports. Because the Managers in Wufoo are based on some of the oldest code in our application, we were excited about taking some time to give them an aesthetic refresh and enhance them with some really nice features targeted at our big boy power users.

New Form Manager

New Report Manager

If you’re a user with a lot of forms and reports, you can wave goodbye to our old school managers, which were lacking in features for organization and minimizing clutter, and say hello to the new and improved managers that come equipped with the following sweet enhancements:

Live Filtering

Gone are the days of scrolling and searching, my friends. With the new super-fast live filtering feature, you can now quickly filter your list of forms and reports as fast as you can type your keywords and searches. It’s pretty amazing to experience and probably best illustrated by a video demo.

Smarter Sorting

The old managers had only one way to display your forms and reports and that was by Creation Date from the oldest to the newest. This meant that when you duplicated or created a new form or report, you always had to play the scrolling dance to access the new creations at the bottom of the page. It was the opposite of good times.

The new managers now sort from newest to oldest by default, which makes finding that new creation much easier at the top of the page. And because flexibility is our new focus in the managers, you can also sort forms and reports by the date they were last edited, which is great for users that are only making changes to certain forms and reports in the middle of their stack. If you’re in the Form Manager specifically, we also added the ability to quickly access your most active forms by sorting that list by the new entries collected today. As you saw in the video link above, sorts can be changed even after doing some filtering, which means you can easily isolate and bubble up exactly what you want, when you want it.

Built in Memory

The new managers were also designed to automatically remember your preferences and last actions. If you select a sort or implement a filter and then leave the page to change a form or view some data, they’ll remember the preferences the next time you return or login.

More Compact Design

One issue we had with the old managers was that they were much more difficult to scan. Because the action buttons under each form and report name repeated over and over again, the visual clutter made for a lot of wasted real estate. Additionally, because the system was generating this markup over and over again, on accounts with a large number of forms and reports, this actually impacted the load times for those users.

To improve usability and performance, we decided to hide these action buttons unless your mouse is hovering over a specific form or report. With the extra space we were able to increase legibility with larger font sizes and display more forms and reports in a smaller vertical space.

We hope you like playing with these new upgrades. As always with these new interface refreshes and code upgrades, this is just the beginning for the managers. We have so many more features planned for these new beauties and you’ll be happy to know that these new updates make implementing them by us much easier down the road. Thanks and enjoy!