Hey form friends! Since this is my first blog post, figured I’d say hi – I’m Patrick, and I’m the new Engineering Manager for Wufoo here at SurveyMonkey. Super excited to be on this awesome team full of amazing people, and I’ll do my best to not bore you with all my upcoming blog posts – promise!
First up, (drum roll, please!)… Pagination! We’ve made a few changes to the Form Manager, so that your lists of forms is now broken down into pages. Now you can select how many forms you want to view per page. Pretty awesome, right!?
Why the switch to pagination?
There have long been battles over pagination, show everything, or the dreaded infinite scroll. The reality is, each have their place and there is no single right answer. Take Google for example: search results are paginated, but Google Images is infinite scroll – and in both scenarios, it works. Bing on desktop is paginated, Bing on mobile infinite scrolls – again, it just works.
On the other hand, lists can benefit from being broken into pages. You’re looking for something specific, and breaking that up into digestible chunks often reduces the amount of time it takes to find what you’re looking for. How many times have you been scrolling down a long list and breezed right past what you were looking for? It happens, and it’s super annoying – especially if you don’t know where it is in the list first.
The entire Wufoo team thought long and hard about what would be best for you, our lovely customers. Pagination just makes the most sense for Wufoo! You’ll be able to view a subset of forms at any given time, which will make the Form Manager load faster and be more scannable.
What about the search function?
In order to make the experience more consistent with other popular search interfaces, and to properly accommodate pagination, the search implementation is no longer real-time filtering the entire list of forms.
If you’re a bit skeptical about this change… don’t worry — it’s going to make the form manager far easier to manage! We’ve added in a couple of lovely buttons for you: Search and Clear. For customers with a large number of forms (and there are many!) this will drastically decrease both Form Manager and search result page load times – basically, we want to help you get your work done faster and smoother with a more familiar flow.
And there you have it! Pagination: one step close to an even better form manager. We know you’ll agree these changes are for the better – and we can’t wait to show you what we’ve got in store for the future!
Comments
While I like the pagination, I am REALLY looking forward to the day that you can sort your forms into folders. I do many of the same events year after year, but I don’t like to keep adding entries on to the same form. Hence, I have a lot of forms, but have to search by a key word or year in order to find them.
Thanks for your continued improvements!
Posted March 14th, 2017 by Maggy.With you on that Maggy. We’re actually going to be leaving wufoo because of lack of form folders. I don’t understand why they the wufoo team spend so much time “thinking long and hard” over features like Pagination when most customers are requesting folders. We have more inactive forms than we do active forms. In it’s current state this just makes our active forms harder to find when you can’t remember the exact name.
Posted March 14th, 2017 by calvin.Agree on the folders. Really, really need them as well as more information about each form. (Author, last modified, etc.)
Definitely appreciate the new features but when will you add the most basic of all – ability to sort list by form NAME? I can understand something like folders is a major functional change. But we’ve been waiting for simple name sort for a long time. Surely it can’t be that hard.
Posted March 14th, 2017 by Joy.Thank you! This is a great improvement. The Forms page loads much faster, and I like being able to see the total number of forms in our account in the pagination controls!
I also agree with the other comments…it would be wonderful if we could organize forms into folders or add tags to forms. We have one account for our university and I would love to be able to assign tags or folders for each department to help organize our 300+ forms, and quickly find all the forms for a given department or group.
Posted March 14th, 2017 by Erik.I’ve asked for a long time already to have the ability to sort my forms. We have forms that are “internal forms” (ones that those at my company complete)… then we have “Client Forms”. I’ve created forms for projects that need to be in a certain order. PLEASE… allow us to SORT AND ORGANIZE OUR FORMS.
Posted March 14th, 2017 by Adam.Good to see that wufoo forms now support Pagination. It is a great improvement.
I personally like the pagination but sometimes you find it irritating. I have seen few websites (especially entertainment websites) are using pagination just to make money. They divide an article into 10-20 pages with images and you have to keep clicking the “NEXT” button to read the whole story.
Posted March 14th, 2017 by Tauseef Alam.