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!

Earlier this week, we quietly released a JavaScript version of our Embed Form Code snippet in the Code Manager so users can dynamically insert their Wufoo forms into their web sites using a script instead of a static iframe. It’s a feature that a lot of our power users have been anxiously waiting for and we’re excited to be able to say that this JavaScript version provides a number of enhancements over the older iframe only version.

While the old embed form code snippet served us and our users well, it had a few drawbacks that made integrating Wufoo into a web site less than ideal. Here’s a list of some of the benefits of this new JavaScript version and why you might want to consider replacing your current iframe embed snippet with the new and shiny:

• Auto-Resizing - The new code snippet can automatically detect the exact height of your form as seen by your users and insert it without having to add extra space beneath the form to prevent cropping. Additionally, it’ll automatically resize itself if your form shows errors after validation and even on the confirmation message page. That means no more cropped Submit Buttons and no more wasted blank space beneath the form that needed to be reserved for potential error messages. Nice and clean and only what you need.

• Faster Loading - Because scripts are executed before iframes in the browser rendering order, your forms will appear to load faster on your web pages because they’re dynamically inserted. Combined with our new caching system for public forms, you should notice this embedded version loading faster than its iframe only counterpart.

• Easier Access to Features - The JavaScript snippet has a number options that make it much easier for the user to manipulate the embedded form code. You can just as easily turn off the autoResize feature (autoResize:false), force a specific height (height:600) and on Bona Fide plans and higher, easily turn off SSL for your embedded form (ssl:false).

• Foundation for Paging - One of the big reasons we had to tackle an auto-resizing embed method was to create the groundwork for inserting forms with multiple pages. Since we know that different pages could have different heights, we needed a more versatile way to insert Wufoo forms into a web site. Now that this is done, we’re on to the next step!

A big thanks goes out to Ryan and Alex on the Wufoo Team, who brought in the magic on this one. For users that are using content managers or systems that do not allow for JavaScript to be inserted into their environments, you can still find the tried and true original iframe version in the Code Manager beneath the JavaScript version. This feature is available to all users on all plans and has been thoroughly tested to work in Internet Explorer 6 and higher, Firefox and Safari.

It’s a rare treat to be able to say that we’ve implemented a new feature that’s available only to our free users. Before this weekend, if you were a Gratis user, your confirmation page probably looked something like this:

Your theme didn’t carry over and a big blocky (kind-of-ugly) link advertising Wufoo showed up under your confirmation message. The reason we didn’t carry over the custom themes was to make sure the ads would always show up on the page (a necessary implementation for us since they help us subsidize these accounts). Of course, this implementation was always a real eye-sore to us and we’ve never been able to shake that feeling that there was a more elegant solution out there. Something more Wufoo-like.

So we’re happy to announce that we’ve redesigned these ads to be smaller and to use our color contrast and matching formulas to better blend in with whatever theme you throw at them.

We think they’re a big improvement over the old and hope you’ll even enjoy sporting these sexier badges on your forms and reports. As always, if you’re on one of our paid plans, you won’t notice a thing since we don’t show these ads and links on paying accounts.

This feature is for our users on the go with varying tastes. While we’ve tried to provide a list of the most popular cellphone carriers for our mobile notifications feature, it’s unfortunately not scalable for us (or our interface) to add every cellular service out there to our list of supported carriers. Since nearly every carrier allows you to send an email to create a text message, we’ve decided to provide a way to add your own carrier if you know their email-to-sms format.

If your carrier is not listed in the mobile notification settings, you can now just choose Other from the Carrier dropdown field and provide your mobile carrier’s email to text message address format in the Your Phone Number field. Here’s an example of AT&T’s format:

5555555555@txt.att.net

Of course, you’ll need to replace the phone number and domain with your mobile number and carrier’s email pattern. For a list of common patterns, check out this Wikipedia article about Email to SMS Gateways. If your carrier is not listed, contact your cellular provider’s help desk to see if they can provide it for you.

This post is to inform you that we will be performing maintenance on Wufoo tonight. The scheduled outage is:

Saturday, March 28th, 2009 12:30am EST - 1:30am EST

While the scheduled time slot is one hour, we do want to alert you to potential uncertainties. The maintenance could take as little as 10 minutes, or it could span longer than the hour scheduled. If it does take longer, we will update our status blog. The downtime is for planned changes that should improve the I/O performance of our main database server. We have been having on and off problems for the past 3 weeks, and we intend to permanently fix the problem so that you can rely on Wufoo without doubt.

Let’s say I’m working on a form in Wufoo to collect some very important information and notice that I’ve gotten a little carried away with the number of choices I’ve made available to my users.

While Wufoo’s default layout of stacking the choices on top of each other works great if they’re sentences or a small numbers of choices, it feels like I’m sort of wasting a lot of space here for this one question.

Well, not anymore, friends! Today, we’re releasing a Field Layout option so that you can set up your choices to be arranged in one column, two columns, three columns or even just side by side next to each other.

We’ve made this feature pretty flexible so it works even with if you’re using the alternative text input field for Multiple Choice fields or with one of our different Label Layouts in the Form Settings. Now you can save space and look good doing it. This feature is available to all users across all plans and can be found under the Field Settings tab in the Form Builder for Multiple Choice and Checkbox Fields.

Prepare to get your happy dance on, because we’re releasing two exciting new widgets to kick up the awesome in your Wufoo reports: Field Charts and Big Numbers. Added to our recently improved line up of graphs, these new widgets (in addition to some cosmetic changes we’ve made to the Report Builder) are some of the new goodness that’s come out of the second phase of our overhaul to Wufoo’s reporting engine.

Field Charts

Field Charts are static tables designed to show at a glance the breakdown of the choices selected by certain fields. This layout is pretty popular for displaying survey data and will be familiar to our marketing veterans out there using Wufoo. In addition to the color-coded horizontal bar chart, they show the percentage and count for each choice, the total number of submissions that entered data for that field and the number of entries that left that field unanswered.

They’re extremely easy to set up. Just add a Field Chart from the Widget Type drop down, select the field you want to have displayed as a Field Chart and then BAM! You’re off to the races. Field Charts will show the 7 most popular choices for that field and then group the rest of the choices into an Other collection. This widget is available for the following fields: Single Line Texts, Multiple Choices, Checkboxes and Dropdowns.

Big Numbers

The Big Number widget lets you pack a lot of punch into a small visual element. We’ve been using them for awhile now internally and we just adore their versatility. On the surface, it’s exactly what you’d expect: a big number. However, the options under the hood are super sweet and will help you add that extra emphasis to the metrics you find most important in your collected data.

For Big Number, you choose the type of data you want to display and the Big Number widget does the heavy lifting in regards to what’s possible for displaying that info. If you have Multiple Choice Fields, Checkbox Fields or Dropdown Fields in your form, you’ll be able to see the count for a specific choice. One great way to utilize this is to highlight the attendance from an invitation form.

If you have Number and Price fields in your form, you have the following calculations available to process that data before displaying it in your report : count, sum, average, minimum, maximum and most popular, which would be mode for the math-inclined.

If you’re into the fancy, you can also setup your Big Number so that it shows the metric you’re tracking in different formats. In addition to adding comma separators on the thousands, we can round the number, limit it to 2 decimals, show it in scientific notation and display it as currency if you so desire.

We also included the ability to show data from statistics that we track on every form in Wufoo. Now you can show on your reports the number of entries, the number of views, the conversion rate and the bounce rate of the form right on your report. You can see this in action in the Dwarf Report screenshot we showed above.

For our users taking advantage of Payment Integration in Wufoo, you’ll be happy to know that you can also use Big Number to track the payment info collected by your forms. Big Number + Payment Integration means you can do things like show the total revenue collected by your payment form, show what revenue was not paid by your users and even show the average revenue collected per entry. It’s cool beans for bean counters.

The Field Chart and Big Number widgets were, of course, also designed to look good in all situations and so are extremely Theme friendly. Like our graphs and likert fields, they will auto-magically adjust their backgrounds, border colors and typography colors to match your theme’s palette. No extra work needed on your end. It’ll just look good. For example, check out that same Dwarf Report from above in Official Wufoo, Down to Earth and Marie Antoinette.

These widgets are available to use right now in the Report Builder and are accessible to all users on all plans in Wufoo. We think they’ll open up your reports to a whole new world of showcasing your data and we can’t wait to see what you guys cook up. Now get out there get you some report lovin’!

Over the last few months, we’ve been thrilled by the ingenuity of developers using our APIs and features to connect and integrate Wufoo into their system to enhance their web applications and services. We’d like to take some time here to highlight a few great examples illustrating two types of integration being done with Wufoo.

Synthasite Form Integration

SynthaSite is a web-based site creator that’s empowering anyone to easily build and host a great-looking web site for free. After creating a web site with SynthaSite, their users naturally wanted to add a form to their web pages to collect information or allow their visitors to contact them. And so this is what they came up with:

The SynthaSite team did a great job of making it really easy to drag and drop a Wufoo contact form into their page designer. All you have to do is drag the Wufoo Form widget into the appropriate content area and a dialog box opens up to accept the Wufoo Form Embed code that can be grabbed from our Code Manager.

Read more about SynthatSite’s Wufoo integration.

MailChimp Data Integration

MailChimp is a do-it-yourself email marketing service that lets you easily send email newsletters, manage subscriber lists and track campaigns. While you could always import email addresses collected by your Wufoo form into MailChimp via our Excel / CSV export, you unfortunately had to do this periodically and manually when you remembered. Their team came up with a really clever solution to automate the process:

Using Wufoo’s ability to serve secure RSS feeds of new entries, MailChimp setup their system to easily pass new data into a subscriber list automatically without the need for programming on the user’s end. All you have to do is enter your Wufoo form’s feed URL and your user credentials. Now your email campaigns will always be up to date with the latest emails collected from your Wufoo form. Pretty sweet, eh?

Read more about MailChimp’s Wufoo integration.

Thanks!

A huge thank you to the teams at SynthaSite and MailChimp for making these integrations happen. We think they’ve done an awesome job with the polish on these implementations and hope you guys enjoy using Wufoo more easily with their services. If you’re offering Wufoo features in your web application in exciting ways, please let us know!.

Here’s a small, but delicious feature nugget we’ve implemented for our friends utilizing Wufoo’s Payment Integration feature. In the Entry Manager, you can now change the status of our your payment by clicking on the Payment Info box. You can cycle through the following five payment statuses :

• Paid
• Unpaid
• Pending
• Cancelled
• Refunded

Please note that overriding the payment status in Wufoo, does not change the payment status on the merchant side or initiate any merchant actions on that payment. It only affects how Wufoo sees the status for that entry. For example, if you override the status from Paid to Refunded, your merchant will not issue a refund.

This feature is useful for Wufoo users that are providing flexible ways of handling payments for orders and events (like accepting checks via the mail), but still want to sync their entry data with their payment workflow and process.

After weeks of planning, preparation and quite a bit of backend architecture adjustment magic, the Wufoo Team is proud to announce the addition of a new field now available to all users across all plans : The Likert Field.

I know we’ve announced a lot of new stuff today, but we’re probably the most excited about this one. For those that don’t know about Likert items, Wikipedia describes the field as “a psychometic scale commonly used in questionnaires, and is the most widely used scale in survey research.” Since we strive to be the easiest way to collect information over the Internet, we thought it only appropriate to try and bring to our users the easiest way to create the most widely used scaling method for measuring bipolar responses from your users.

And our Likert field isn’t just another pretty face. She’s also very flexible and highly customizable. You can adjust the number of columns to measure up to 10 levels of assessment and we’ve even provided lots of alternative predefined levels for you to play with so you can measure not only agreement, but comparison, importance and even satisfaction of the statements you want your users to assess.

Adding statements to your Likert field should also be very easy and familiar. It’s based on the UI we use for creating choices for dropdown and multiple choice fields. Also, with a single click you can hide the values beneath the radio fields or add a Non Applicable column if you want to grant the user a way to definitively show a withholding of opinion when making your Likert field required. Like checkbox choices, please be aware that each statement in a likert field is counted as an individual field and will count against the total field count for the form.

And because we’re devoted not only to user friendly inputs, but beautiful ones as well, we’ve taken additional steps to ensure that a Wufoo Likert field will look great on a wide variety of themes and web sites. Using the same color contrasting formula that we developed for our new graphing system, Wufoo will automatically adjust the border and zebra colors of the field to match and be visible against any form background color that you choose, that includes both light and dark ones.

And that’s it for all the new goodies. We’re really proud of this implementation and are hoping you’ll be just as excited to use it. We can’t wait to see how you’ll use Likert to create better and more powerful surveys to make better and more informed decisions.