By Kevin Hale · August 19th, 2008
For our users running contests and application processes with Wufoo, you’ll be excited to know that we’ve added a new feature to some of our fields that allow you to set the minimum and maximum of the input coming in from your users.
These new range options provide a way to limit the characters and words entered into single-line text fields and paragraph fields and also to control the values and digits submitted to number fields and price fields.
Instructions for the user are automatically displayed to the user under the field based on your settings. For example, there are three types of wording shown for limiting words :
- If a min is set, but no max : Must be at least 14 words.
- If a max is set, but no min : Maximum Allowed: 100 words.
- If both are set : Must be between 25 and 150 words.
Our international users will be happy to know that these range instructions are powered by our translation backend and so as our great community of polyglots create translations for the statements, they’ll work appropriately for the language settings on your form.
Live Word, Character and Digit Counter on Forms
In addition to the server-side validation for these settings and instructions, we’ve also included a JavaScript counter on public forms that will provide your users a live count of the characters, words and digits used on those range-specified fields.
The new range features are available to all users across all plans and can be accessed from the Field Settings tab for the Single-Line Text Fields, Paragraph Fields, Number Fields and Price Fields. We hope you guys love it!
Posted in News & Updates | Post a Comment
By Ryan Campbell · August 18th, 2008
In the past, a login was required in order to download any files in your Wufoo account — even if those files were visible in a public report. This ended up becoming a huge pain for many of our users that work in team-based situations because any invited user notified via an email notification or public report could not download the file, and the Wufoo admin would have to manually download it and email it to the user. Thanks to some new improvements on our end, we now have a new URL system for file downloads that allows you to share direct download links to files without having to login.
A couple things about this new system :
By default, all files have a hidden, encrypted URL. If this URL is accessed, the file can be downloaded. The only people with access to this URL are people who can see the Entry Manager (password protected), the RSS feeds (password protected) or have confirmation emails sent directly to them. If you have access to the URL via these methods, you can share this link via instant messenger or email yourself if you would like to share the file.
In regards to publicly accessible reports, files in reports can also be accessed without a password or logging in, but they are given a separate URL different from the one above. This way, if a user views your public report they can download the file, but if you decide to change or delete the report at a later date, they can no longer view the files.
Essentially, each file has a private, encrypted URL that you should share with those you trust and a public URL that becomes available if you make a report containing the file public. For more information, we’ve outlined all security concerns in our security docs.
Posted in News & Updates | 4 Comments
By Ryan Campbell · August 18th, 2008
We’ve recently implemented an overdue update to Wufoo’s Code Manager that should provide a lot more flexibility to users wanting to integrate their forms with their web site and workflow. The first thing we did was give the Code Manager a facelift to bring it up to our new interface standards. This allowed us to both improve usability and create room to add a few new features we’ve been wanting to see for some time now.
Zipped File Packages
In addition to some extra options like explicit code snippets for including a link to your form in an email or chat, we’ve also made it much easier for designers and developers to use Wufoo as a form wireframing tool.
The XHTML / CSS code engine works just like the one in the Form Gallery and provides a single zip file containing all of the HTML, CSS, JavaScript and images you need to manipulate the form you designed within Wufoo.
Pop-up Form Link
We also added new snippet that allows you to pop your form up in a new window when the user clicks on a link.
This is useful for web sites wanting to recreate the ability to provide a survey about a product or service that doesn’t necessarily need to be integrated into the web page or taking the user away from the page itself via a regular link.
Static Form URLs
And perhaps most importantly, we have reworked some core URL problems with Wufoo forms. When you send your form link to a friend, the name of the form is in the URL. For example, you may see http://username.wufoo.com/forms/untitled-form/. The benefit to this is that it is easy to read, and easy to search for at a later date. But unfortunately, if you change the name of your form, the URL changes also. This is bad if the form is embedded on your web site because it means that you will have to copy & paste the form embed code all over again.
To fix this, we have created static form URLs in addition to the URLs based off of the form name. A static URL means that as long as the form exists, the URL will always work. Now you can grab the new embed code from the new Code Manager and never have to worry about making an update to your site again when you make changes to your form.
Posted in News & Updates | 2 Comments
By Kevin Hale · August 13th, 2008
We’ve got a real treat for our power users today. One of the features our users love about Wufoo is all the ways it can keep them updated about new entries as they are submitted to their forms. They can receive emails, mobile text messages and even an RSS feed of their data as it comes in. Today, we’re excited to announce another great way to keep tabs on your data through a Windows desktop application we’ve developed called Wufoo Unplugged.
Wufoo Unplugged is an installable Windows XP / Vista application that provides desktop alerts and offline access to the information collected by your Wufoo forms. With Unplugged, you can keep a local copy of your data on your computer that syncs with your online account whenever you’re connected to the Internet. New entries are downloaded as they come in and when you’re on the go, you can still browse through your past entries.
You can also setup Wufoo Unplugged to provide visual and audio notifications of new entries as they are collected, which is great for users that need a reliable way to be notified of new submissions to their forms without having to add additional clutter to their inbox.
We’re providing Wufoo Unplugged as a FREE download to all primary users (sorry, not sub-users at the moment) across all plans. All you need is an active Wufoo account, either Windows XP with Service Pack 2 or Windows Vista and an Internet connection to sync with your data. To learn more, check out the Unplugged documentation.
Many thanks and congratulations goes out to Tim and Alex, the two new members of the Wufoo Team for creating Unplugged. We think they’ve done a great job on the application and we hope you enjoy the fruits of their labor.
Posted in News & Updates | 22 Comments
By Kevin Hale · August 12th, 2008
Earlier this year, the Nielsen Norman Group, one of the top firms focusing on human-centered product development process, conducted a design competition to identify the world’s ten best application user experiences. We are incredibly excited to announce that Wufoo has been selected by Jakob Nielsen, “the guru of web page usability,” as one of the winners of the design competition.
Congratulations are in order to all of the other winners! We’re humbled to have been named among such fine folks. Also, many thanks goes out to the Nielsen Norman Group for the great honor and all of our users who helped us shape Wufoo into what is is today. You guys are the ones that helped us add the real polish and for that, this award is just as much yours as it ours. For more information about the competition and results, please checkout the official announcement on Nielsen’s blog.
Posted in News & Updates | 5 Comments
By Kevin Hale · July 8th, 2008
A little known fact about the people behind Wufoo is that we like a good run. This past Fourth of July weekend, the entire Wufoo team participated in the 29th Annual Kiwanis Morton Plant Mease Midnight Run. The race helps raise money for the Dunedin and Countryside Kiwanis clubs and we were thrilled to be able to participate this year’s 5k.
We didn’t shatter any personal records or times because we ran mostly as a team, but it was good to have an excuse to run across a bridge at midnight in Wufoo garb. Thanks a lot to our new friend, Bryan, for taking our picture! It would have been a shame to have missed documenting the sweaty occasion. Also, happy belated birthday, Wufoo! You’re 2 years old!
Posted in Good Times | 6 Comments
By Ryan Campbell · May 8th, 2008
User Management is officially live in Wufoo, and we say that with both excitement and relief. Emails containing feature requests come to us daily, and not surprisingly User Management has been the most requested feature. Whether it’s small businesses wanting individual logins for each user, large companies hoping to separate their account by divisions, or design shops looking for an easier way to set up an account to each of their clients — everyone had a need for User Management. With all of these use cases in mind, we have been working with a single focus to implement the feature in a way that we feel would be flexible, easy to use and priced fairly. User management is available to all $24/month Bona Fide accounts and higher.
Specifically, User Management allows for multiple email addresses to log in to the same account. Each email address, or user, can be assigned Create, View and Edit permissions on Forms, Themes and Reports. So if we want to create a user with access to only one form, and nothing else, we can do it. At the same time, it may not be desirable to micromanage every person and so keeping that in consideration, we have built in a few helpful features:
- By just checking off one box, you can flag a user as an Admin and grant them permissions to all resources.
- You can duplicate a user so that their permissions are easily carried over to a new user with similar access levels
- And whenever a user has permission to create something, they are automatically assigned permissions for that item, which prevents the Account Creator from having to go in and manually assign every item.
In addition to what’s mentioned here, you can read more about our User Management offering in our documentation. We’ve got big smiles on now that we’re finally able to show you our work, so check it out and please send us your feedback!
Posted in News & Updates | 23 Comments
By Ryan Campbell · March 25th, 2008
A common request in Wufoo is to send a user to a form with some of the data already filled in. Whether it’s a unique ID representing the user or their email and mailing address, anything that saves time and confusion increases the chance that a form gets filled out. Another use for this sort of functionality is to track a user. We recently found ourselves wanting to track what users were doing before they emailed support. Our goal was to find out if our new documentation was working and, more importantly, if users were even reaching the docs before they decided to contact us. It turns out that we were able to create all of the functionality we needed using Wufoo alone, so we would like to share our implementation process with you.
See it in Action
Before we go on and explain all of the small details, let’s take a look at the result this article produces. In order to understand the result, we need to go over a quick background. In Wufoo, there are two ways to contact support: a feedback form and a support request form. The feedback form is for sales questions, product feedback and general information. The support request form is for bugs or complications encountered when using the program. We designed support to make it easy to contact us, but we still want people to look at the documentation because we believe we have made the docs quick and helpful.
That said, we still didn’t want to force users with general questions to go through the documentation, so we have two links in every footer. To see if this approach was working, we started tracking which page people were viewing when they decided to use the feedback form. We know people are viewing our documentation when they use the support request form and ideally we would like people to be on our home page or marketing material when using the feedback form. Using only Wufoo forms and reports, we gathered these results.
Given this information, we can see that the feedback form is working as intended for the most part. There is still a decent amount of feedback coming from within the Wufoo admin interface that we would like to convert over to the support request form, but more than 80% of feedback seems to be submitted properly.
Implementation
While a tracking system seems quite complex, there are only a handful of steps needed to recreate what we’ve done:
- Create a Wufoo form.
- Populate the default values.
- Hide the tracking fields.
- Create a Wufoo report.
And of those steps, the only one that requires basic programming or work on your end is to populate the default values. You will have to supply the information that needs to be pre-filled in the form.
Creating a Wufoo Form
For this step, we’ll create a form inside of Wufoo. The one thing to make sure of is that a field is created to hold the tracking data. In the case of the example above, this will be a single line text to hold a word describing where the user came from. Later on we will hide this field, but for now it will be visible to everyone and the resulting form will appear similar to the one below.
Populate the Default Values
Now that we have a form, we will want to populate it with default values before the user begins filling it out. This is controlled through the URL of the form. The link that the user clicks on to go to the form will have the data in it, so that when the form loads the data can be placed in the fields. We have full documentation on URL modifications that we can reference (the URL explains how to find the ID for each field), but for the example form we’re using, the format would be:
http://username.wufoo.com/forms/form-name/def/field2=home
Make sure that username is replaced with your Wufoo username and form-name is replaced with the name of the form. When the form loads, we will see the data already populated in the last field.
For those of you interested in more technical information, we wanted to show you the code snippet we use to determine what page the user was viewing before they clicked on the Feedback form. The URL above shows the word “home” hard coded, but we want to make this dynamic. To do this, we parse the URL that they are currently on with a little PHP script:
<?php
$url = "http://" . $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] . $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];
$splits = explode('/', $url);
$category = 'home';
if($splits[3]) $category = $splits[3];
?>
We grab the URL, and we strip out the directory. For example, http://wufoo.com/gallery/ would place the word “gallery” into the form.
Hide the Tracking Fields
Since the data is laced into the field without the need for the user to type it in, there is no need for the user to see the field at all. Back in November, we added the ability to attach custom CSS class names to any field in a form. Using that feature, we’re going to attach the name of “hide” to the tracking field. In Wufoo, edit your form and the click on the field to bring up the field settings. Locate the setting that says Advanced CSS Layout Options, and type the word “hide” in there (without the double quotes). Save your form, and then go view the live version. The field should no longer be visible.
Create a Report
As people begin to fill out our form, we can analyze the data in a few ways. The easiest way is to click on Reports, and create a report with a pie chart. When we add a graph to the report, we use the tracking field as the field to graph, and then we can get a quick overview of the pages people were viewing prior to using the Feedback form.
The nice part of the default values feature is that it can be used in many ways. Creating a report is the easiest way to view your data, but there are definitely more powerful ways. For example, some of our users send a customer ID into their form. Then, on their own web site, they query their data by searching for the customer ID in the Query API. This allows them to then present the data back to the users on their own web site. But most importantly, it was a relief to find out that we could track custom data so easily.
Posted in Tips & Tricks | Post a Comment
By Ryan Campbell · February 27th, 2008
For the past few months we have been silently changing email notifications. The purpose of changing the emails was to make them more polished and up to the Wufoo standard without disrupting what our current users have become familiar with. The process we decided on was to make a template, and roll it out to 5,000 users. Then, based on feedback, revise the template and roll out to another 5,000. Rinse and repeat those steps until all users have seen the new template. The end result contains better looking emails, new features and a plain text option.
Feedback on the appearance of the emails was consistent on a few points. Below is a list of concerns, and how we modified the emails in response:
Smarter formatting of custom Wufoo fields: All fields now have the same formatting found in the entry manager. Unlike previous emails that just presented a list, the new format shows the data in context of the field type.
Preserve space: Certain fields are concatenated. For example, a Name field in the email will show “Ryan Campbell” all on the same line. Additionally, if a field was not filled out, it will not appear in the email. This makes brief glances at an email easier, and saves room for printing.
Improve readability: By placing a fixed width on the field names, the data submitted by the user always aligns making for an easier read. We also put logic to change the display of a paragraph text based on how many characters the user typed in.
Permalink to entries: Quickly editing an entry is desirable for some uses of Wufoo, but placing a permalink on every email didn’t work out. Too many people send out emails to different parties who don’t have login access, so the link was just wasted space and a distraction at the bottom of the email. The compromise we came to is that a permalink will be placed at the bottom of a notification if the email is sent to the Wufoo account holder, and there is no Reply To address set. So, if you use Wufoo for dialogue with your customers, there will be no permalink; however, when using by yourself for personal tracking, it will be present.
Along with feedback on the design of the new emails, a good amount of feature requests came in. Based on that feedback, we have added: custom notification settings to change the From Address and Message Subject, a templating system to allow for dynamic Messages Subjects, and the ability to change an email to plain text. We decided to offer a plain text version for those users who programmatically parse emails or who have an email client designed to support plain text. We’re happy and excited to have this ironed out and on the live servers, and we hope you like the changes.
Posted in News & Updates | 3 Comments
By Ryan Campbell · February 26th, 2008
This post is to inform you that we will be performing maintenance on Wufoo this coming Saturday. The scheduled outage is:
Saturday, March 1st, 2008
7:00pm EST - 8:00pm EST
View All Timezones
While the scheduled time slot is one hour, we do want to alert you to the potential of delays. Wufoo is unique in the way that each account is isolated for security, which can cause unexpected behavior when performing updates. If this setup interferes with the work we will be performing Saturday, a full transfer to the new hardware must be done. This transfer would take approximately 5 hours. Our initial testing shows that we should be able to avoid this, but we want to give you the heads up to make you aware of everything going on.
The downtime is for the addition of hardware that will improve performance, stability and add enhancements to our backup procedures. While the system is unavailable, all Wufoo pages will show a maintenance screen and public forms and reports will show a text message (black text on white background) explaining that the form is undergoing maintenance. Please prepare your sites appropriately. Thanks for bearing with us as we continue to grow.
Posted in Maintenance | Post a Comment
