Yesterday, we took some time to show off the new control interface for the redesigned Report Builder we’re prepping to go live soon. One of the steps in the report creation process we didn’t go over yesterday was the 4th step, which focuses on each of your report’s widget settings. Just as a form in Wufoo is made up of different types of fields to take in input, a Wufoo report is made up of a collection of widgets that process and visualize that data.
In the new Report Builder, there will be 5 types of widgets (Graphs, Charts, Numbers, Text and Datagrid) that you can add, mix and match in your reports. Because each widget type is uniquely different in their presentation and function, they have their own unique set of features and settings. The following is a look at the redesigned interface settings we’ve created for each report widget in the new Report Builder.
Graph Settings
These graph settings will be very familiar to those familiar with the old Report Builder. We’ve added a twist to one of the graph types, but we’ll talk about that in another post.
Chart Settings
One feature we’ve added to our Field Charts is the ability to selectively show certain columns if it’s using a Field Chart type that’s dedicated to showing choices. The column options will allow you to choose between All Columns, Percentage Only and Count Only.
Number Settings
The Number Settings work and feel just like our old Big Number settings, but with a different arrangement to enhance clarity and take better use of the space in the controls.
Datagrid Settings
One of things we’ve done with the new datagrid settings is do a much better job of separating the fields from the entry specific information (ie. Date Created, IP Address, etc.) and payment information (ie. total, status, merchant, etc.). This will make choosing the appropriate data to highlight a lot easier. We’ve also added a new feature that allows you to specify ahead of time which column to sort your datagrid ahead of time and whether you want it sorted in ascending or descending order. Because the datagrid widget is a resource intensive and complicated data browsing tool, you will only be able to have one datagrid on a report at a time.
Text Settings
This is a new widget type that we’ve added to the new Report Builder to add flexibility to the system. You can now easily add static text to your reports to help explain your data to your users. As you can see here, you can supplement the formating of this text with standard HTML.
For the last few months, we’ve been diligently working on completely transforming the report making experience in Wufoo. While we’ve always been proud of our ability to help you visualize your data, we always thought that we could do so much more.
Our vision for this new system was ambitious and so we’ve had to work on this project in stages. First, we started by rewriting the backend of the reporting engine so that it can take advantage of our new API system. This created a solid foundation for all the new stuff we wanted to incorporate and also had the nice side effect of making our export engine a lot more reliable. Earlier this year, we finished phase two, which launched a whole new set of widgets (field charts and big numbers) so you can show off your data in lots of new and exciting ways. The last step on this project, which we’re coming very close to releasing here, was to do a complete code and interface overhaul of Wufoo’s Report Builder.
While we’re still testing and putting the finishing touches on the new system, we thought it would be nice to take some time over the next few days to give a little preview here on the blog of the new interface and features. One of the biggest changes that you’ll see in the new interface is that it’s a lot more visual. Like Wufoo’s Form Builder and Theme Designer, the new Report Builder will be divided into two parts: a control interface that contains all the settings that you can manipulate in your report and a dynamic preview that’ll allow you to see what you’re designing. Today, we’re going to focus on the new control interface.
As you can see, we’ve decided to divide the report creation process in Wufoo into four steps with each step having it’s own specific settings. Navigating through the steps are easy. As you finish each step, just click on the next step’s title and it’ll slide out to show you it’s settings. We’ve worked really hard to make the feel of this interface very fast and very natural.
Report Settings
This is a fairly straightforward first step that’ll be familiar to everyone on the old system. This is where you’ll give your report a name and description. One new feature we’ve added here is the ability to allow or not allow your users the ability to export the data from the public report. This is good for allowing reports to show off your stuff without giving full access to your users.
Data Settings
Just like in the old Report Builder, the Data Settings are where you specify what form you want the report to base all its data processing from. There’s been a lot of goodness added to this step. One feature we’ve added from the Entry Manager is to make filters context sensitive. For example, if you’re filtering by date, different conditions will show appropriate to that property (is before, is on, is after) in addition to a date picker. This smart processing makes filtering your data a good deal more intuitive and the options available to you a lot more accessible.
Layout Settings
Again, very exciting stuff here. As you can see, reports in Wufoo will be able to take advantage of multiple premade layouts. This means you won’t have to stack all your widgets one right after each other. Instead you can use different zones to structure your widgets where you’d like.
Additionally, like in the Form Builder, we’ve got a dedicated section that’ll allow you to add your widgets where you want them by clicking or dragging them to the new Report Builder’s live preview. We’ve added all the same polish that you’ve come to expect from Form Building experience and we can’t wait for you to try it out.
That’s it for now. We hope you like what you see and we’ll be back with more soon.
Hello fellow form builders! Inspired by some recent support requests and fueled by a Diet Coke frenzy, we’ve turned list of files in your Excel export into clickable links to directly access your entries’ attachments.
This means that if you’re collecting images or documents through your form, you no longer have to log into Wufoo to access your stored files each time you need them. Now you can export your data into Excel and follow clickable links to access your files whenever you want them.
And Excel is not the only export format receiving this upgrade. CSV and Tab-Delimited exports will also include the links as well, except they’ll just be the url to the file on our servers. While not clickable like their Excel brothers, these links are still helpful for machine-parsing your File Upload info data.
As most of you are aware, on Monday night and Tuesday afternoon our services were temporarily unavailable. Now that everything is stable, we’d like to take some time here to explain what we know about what happened and answer some of the most commonly asked questions that came up during the incident. Before we get to the technical details, the most important message we would like to convey is that we understand how serious this downtime was and we offer our sincerest apologies to you and your users for having to go through this. We know many of you run important registrations, campaigns, contests and services through Wufoo and, for some, the timing couldn’t have been worse. We completely empathize and hope the following will help you understand our position and our options for the future and restore some of that lost confidence.
So, what happened exactly?
During both outages, the problem was the same — all power went out at the data center and this resulted in all sites and services hosted there to go down in addition to ours. The downside to a power loss on this scale is that all core level services were affected. This therefore significantly increased the time to get all servers online. Networking on critical level servers had to be brought up first, and then all application level servers had to go through a crash recovery process.
We’re still working on getting a better understanding from our data center as to how and why this happened, and how they’re going to make sure this isn’t going to happen again. When we picked this data center, their power system was one of the key criteria. The main elements of their power equipment (UPS, generator and power control) are all good systems with ample capacity. We’re still trying to understand what it was about how these are put together, or how they’ve been managed, that led to the failure that we had.
What triggered the power outage?
In both cases, there was a significant reduction in the voltage to the building from the local electric utility.
Doesn’t Wufoo’s servers have a backup power supply?
We have redundant circuits on two separate power systems. Additionally, our UPS systems turned on as expected, and provided power for another hour after the outage occured. The third, and final, resort is to use a generator when a failure like this happens. Once an outage gets to the level that we had earlier this week, we must rely on the the company that runs the data center to get emergency systems like a generator up and operational. We don’t have the details yet, but there was apparently some difficulty in switching over to generator power, so the UPS reserves on our systems therefore ran out. Again, we’re seeking more details about this.
Once power came back, why was Wufoo down for so long?
It is tough to prepare for a worst case scenario, and we can assure you everyone at BitPusher (our server management team) was moving as fast as they could. Realistically, recovery from a situation like this will always take at least an hour since all core servers need to be restored and all application servers have individual crash recovery processes that have to complete. On Tuesday, the process went smoother and it took approximately an hour from when power was restored.
What improvements are you going to make?
Continuing in the current environment without significant changes that ensure this won’t happen again is unacceptable. We are examining three different directions: better power in the existing facility, moving our infrastructure to a different facility, and working with third-party hosting partners.
One thing, we’re also working on is creating better communication strategies and methods for communicating with our users during such incidents. While we responded (as always) to every single email sent in during the outage with updates as they came in, it’s good for you to know how to passively observe our actions behind the scenes.
Many of you followed our updates on on our Twitter page and our Wufoo Status blog and we think everyone liked how that worked out. Currently, we’re working on ways to enhance the Wufoo Status blog so that it provides daily updates and a feed on our uptime status and additional information. More on that to come as we enhance those processes.
Why was there no downtime page?
Normally, Wufoo has a styled downtime page that appears when a form is unavailable. These pages make the embedded forms look more professional. During these outages, there was no downtime page and every request to our servers timed out. The reason for this is because our current downtime system relies on the load balancer. Since the load balancer lost power also, we had no downtime page to serve. We’re currently looking at our options for restoring downtime functionality from another facility.
Is my data safe?
Yes. There was no data loss during the power outage and all servers successfully completed crash recovery without issue.
This experience hurt our company. We would like a refund.
We completely understand and again apologize for such inconveniences. If you feel that these outages directly interfered with your primary purpose for using Wufoo, please contact us via support and we would be happy to give you a refund for this month’s services.
End Note
During the outage, many of you were actually very supportive and we’re extremely grateful for such understanding and support. We’ve always believed that we have the best kinds of people using Wufoo and many of your actions this week served as a testament that this really is true. Our entire team sincerely thanks all of you for such patience and understanding and hope we can live up to such good treatment by minimizing these incidents to few and far between.
Just a quick message to let everyone know that the Wufoo Team can now be found on Twitter!
If you’re curious as to why we didn’t jump on the train sooner, it’s because some dude in Spain was squatting our name (we know, very weird). Many thanks to our friends at Twitter for helping us sort that out.
One of the most valuable members on our team is our beloved accountant, Elaine. We know from experience that it’s extremely important to be nice to her. She’s both the Gatekeeper and Key Master of our fiscal destinies (budgets and paychecks) and nothing seems to get by her super hawk eyes. In appreciation of the work done by all the Elaines out there in various companies and organizations using Wufoo, we’d like to dedicate the following features to you.
Charge Explanation Page
Inspired by the good folks over at 37signals, Chris and I made some changes to how we bill customers so there’s a lot less confusion when it comes time for those in charge of the coffers to view your credit card statements. We changed the name associated with our credit card charges from Infinity Box Inc. to wufoo.com/charge/ and designed the following charge explanation page to go along with it:
This Wufoo Charge page presents the most frequently asked questions about being billed for Wufoo’s services. It’s been set up like this for a few months now and we’ve already seen a nice decrease in inquiries and chargeback requests for our recurring charges.
Redesigned Invoice Section
Earlier today, we talked a bit about the redesigned Account Manager. For users on paid plans, you’ll notice that we’ve completely revamped how invoices and billing information are presented on that page.
Instead of a simple list of links to past invoices, we’ve created a color-coded grid (colors are based on the plan charged for that month) organized by year. Beige charges indicate invoices that contain non-standard monthly charges like overages or prorated amounts that occur during upgrades in the middle of the billing cycle. We’ve also added a quick view of the current billing information on file with a link to our redesigned billing information page.
Email Past Invoices
Since we’re discussing invoices, we should also mention that we’ve added the ability for users with permission to email past invoices to anyone they choose. If your accountant (let’s say Bob) wants to take a look at January’s invoice, you no longer have to print out and walk said invoice to his office. You can now easily avoid Bob’s steely glare with this new feature. Just press the Email button on the invoice, specify Bob’s address, and press send. One and done.
Send Invoices to Multiple Recipients
And here’s our final finishing move for the accountant in your office. In the past, Wufoo sent billing invoices only to the account creator. This caused issues because most billing departments are located elsewhere from the developer using the service and because there was a lack of communication, the accountants would have no idea why the company / organization was being charged for our services.
Well no more, friends! You can now keep your accountant in the loop. The Account Creator can now specify additional email addresses to have invoices sent to and that means no more excuses about mysterious charges. Just imagine the pride on your accountant’s face when they realize you were thinking of them for once!
Today, we’ve made some really nice changes to Wufoo’s Account Manager. In addition to a complete refresh of the interface, the new and improved page now takes better advantage of the new billing backend painstakingly written by our Chris over the last few months.
Accounts with User Management will notice that the page can now be viewed by all Admins on an account (in addition to the Account Creator). While the Account Creator is still the only user that can perform account level changes like upgrade, downgrade and delete, Admins can still join in for some fun helping to check usage statistics and manage invoice / billing related information.
DIY Subdomain Change
One new feature we’ve added to the Account Manager is the ability to change your subdomain on the fly. The account subdomain (http://subdomain.wufoo.com/) is set by you on account creation and helps us uniquely identify your account on our servers. Requests by users wanting to change this parameter come to us quite a bit in support and we thought it would be nice to go ahead and empower our users to do it themselves rather than go through the process of asking us or deleting their account to create a new one.
Now, if you’ve chosen http://myawesomedomain.wufoo.com/ for your Wufoo URL, but then find yourself in the enviable position of having your company bought out for millions of dollars (it could happen) and the suits in charge ask you to change your domain to http://wewearties.wufoo.com/. This can now be accomplished easily through the new Account Manager.
WARNING. If you change the subdomain associated with your account, please note that all of the links to your forms and reports will break when you make this change, which means you’ll have to update links to your forms and reports, and copy/paste any integrated snippets you used from the Code Manager on your web sites. So please consider carefully the ramifications before you give this feature a try.
Account Usage Visualizations
The redesigned Account Manager also sports a much more exciting and useful dashboard for checking your Wufoo resource usage. Now, you can easily see the percentage of entries, forms, reports and disk space you’re using in context of your plan’s limits.
The graphs will change colors (green, yellow and red) based on whether you’re using less than 50%, between 50% and 75% and over 75% of your account’s allowed resource usage. Accounts that have gone over their entry limit will see an exclamation mark and plans that have unlimited limits for a resource will showcase an infinity symbol.
Because each account is allowed to collect a certain number of entries each month across all forms based on their current plan, we’ve also added below the graphs the date for when your next Entry Limit refresh will occur. This date represents the next time your account will reset the entry limit so you can collect more entries on your forms without penalty.
User Info Updating and API Info Moved
We’ve also done some streamlining in the Account Manager to move certain actions like User Info changes and API Info access to other more appropriate areas of Wufoo. Since changes to your user’s name, email address and time zone were already duplicated in User Management, we went ahead and moved over change password to User Management as well. You can still view your user info in the Account Manager, but a link to making changes will take you to the Users tab. One of the nice by products of moving Change Password to User Management is that Admins can now change / reset the password for their sub users without having to contact support.
In regards to accessing your account’s API Information, this button has been moved over to each form’s appropriate Code Manager page. Because the API page had the tendency to sprawl as you added more forms, we’ve consolidated this view. At the top of this page you’ll find a drop-down box that allows you to filter your API information by form. We think your scrolling finger will thank you.
While doing some debugging for one of our users, we saw that they used some simple JavaScript animation to show off their Wufoo lead generation form.
You can see the real form in action at twentyonedesigns.co.uk. We think it’s a really clever way to make a nice impression. This is just one of the many really sweet forms that our users are constantly creating on the system and we’re going to try and be more regular about highlighting them here on the blog for all to see.
Thanks again to Twentyone Designs for sharing this with us!
Last month, we added Field Charts to the line up of visual elements available to your Wufoo reports. It’s been so much fun watching you guys use them to illustrate your fields that have choices that we’ve been working hard behind the scenes to both expand the depth and breadth of these static data representations.
Field Charts Now Available for More Fields
When we launched Field Charts, they were only available for Multiple Choice, Checkbox, Drop Down and Single Line Text field types. For users wanting to take advantage of these horizontal graph representations for other fields, we’ve also added the ability to use them with Number, Date, Price, Web Site and Time fields.
Extended View
On Field Charts that contain data with lots of choices, we’ve been compiling the information to show the 7 most popular choices and representing the rest as an Other bar at the bottom of the chart. Thanks to our new extended view for field charts, a link to drill down and view this data can now be seen next to these Other groupings.
Now, if you want to view more detail about those other choices, you can click on the View link to see a detailed pop up view of that field chart’s data.
Additional Field Chart Types
We’ve also been thinking about ways to bring Field Charts to other fields. Because we realize showing the most popular choices in a horizontal bar chart form isn’t the most appropriate view for all fields, we’ve created a grid-like view to represent these fields in alternate ways.
For example, phone number entries are, for the most part, always pretty unique in a dataset. For this reason, you probably don’t want to see a bar chart of the most popular phone numbers. In fact, you’d be better served seeing a static table of your most recently submitted numbers, which is what we’ve done for these fields. Here’s some examples of the alternate views we’ve created for these field charts:
Paragraph Field Chart
Address Field Chart
File Upload Field Chart
This grid view is automatically created when you choose a Field Chart for any of the following field types: Address, Email, Name, Phone, File and Paragraph Text. These field charts also have extended views that let you page through and navigate this data in external pop up windows.
These additional field charts are live right now in the Report Builder and are available to all users across all plans (except for the File Upload field chart, which requires your plan to be able to accept file uploads). Thanks to everyone that’s been playing with these new visualizations and we hope we’ll be able to bring some more of these cool widgets soon.
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!
The Wufoo Blog is the official online publication written by the developers of Wufoo about their online form builder, form-related technologies, and whatever else may fit their fancy—like robots.
