In order to make your web forms look as good as possible right out of the box, we made a small change to the layout of forms hosted by FormAssembly.com.

Forms are now centered and their width has been reduced. Here’s a demonstration form using this new layout (it used to look like this).

To minimize any adverse effect to the layout of existing forms, this change only applies to forms created or modified since March 16th. This change also does not affect forms that are hosted on your site, unless the form is displayed through an inline frame.

If your form picked up the new layout but you need to keep the old one, please follow the instructions here. The code snippet you’ll need is the one named ‘Removing the default background on forms hosted directly on FormAssembly.com’.

Do you have any suggestion on how we could keep improving the look & feel of your form? We’d love to hear from you. Please post your ideas here, or on our UserVoice forum.

Thank you.

I remember first stumbling on Luke Wroblewski’s writing a couple years ago during the early stages of FormAssembly. His insights on web forms design has been extremely valuable to us. I’m happy we can (modestly) return the favor by promoting his latest book, published earlier this year.

“In Web Form Design, Luke Wroblewski draws on original research, his considerable experience at Yahoo! and eBay, and the perspectives of many of the field’s leading designers to show you everything you need to know about designing effective and engaging Web forms. ” - (excerpt from rosenfeldmedia.com)

To order a copy of “Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks”  and get 10% off, go to: http://rosenfeldmedia.com (Promo code FORMASSEMBLY).

Web Forms: Filling in the Blanks

Luke Wroblewski’s book will provide everything you wanted to know and more about designing effective and engaging Web forms that optimize these key customer interactions. Rosenfeld Media, 2008. Read More >

BTW, nice cover by Jason Kernevich.

One of most common questions we receive these days is “how can I download the form’s HTML code?”. This option has always been available, but it was somewhat buried behind a link in the ‘display & processing’ tab.

We decided to address this usability issue by providing a new tab called ‘Publish’. This tab contains all the information needed to start using your web form and this is the first thing you’ll see when you leave the Form Builder. The ‘Display & Processing’ tab has been renamed ‘Display Options’ and, without the publishing information, is now shorter.

We hope you’ll find this change helpful. Please feel free to comment on any usability issue you’ve encountered on FormAssembly.com.

If you looked at FormAssembly.com recently but decided that using a third-party service to manage your web forms wasn’t the right solution for you, we have some good news. FormAssembly On-Site is now available.

The On-Site edition offers the same great features enjoyed by thousands of our online users, but you can run it on your own server and keep your data safe and private.

To learn more about FormAssembly On-Site, go to:
http://onsite.formassembly.com

The new FormAssembly for AppExchange offers on-demand web form creation and data collection to Salesforce users.

Built on the latest version of FormAssembly.com, with its powerful Form Builder and plenty of incredible features, it lets you create or update any record in Salesforce with web forms. With a simple point&click interface you can create forms to capture new leads, update contacts, open cases, attach files, etc..

We are a Salesforce certified partner since January 2007. Salesforce features are available only in our Professional Plan for users with a Salesforce Unlimited, Enterprise or Professional Edition.

Here’s an overview of the latest improvements:

Work with any Salesforce Record

Our connector now works with any Salesforce object, including custom objects. It is aware of required fields, data types and object relationships. You can for instance create a Lead and link it to a Campaign (two different Salesforce objects), or create a Contact and add an Attachment, all with a single web-form.

Import a Form from Salesforce

Using the new import tool, it literally takes about 30 seconds to get a fully working web form that creates a new lead, case, or that custom object that took you so long to define in Salesforce.

Upsert Records in Salesforce

Upsert is a mechanism that allows you to insert or update a record in Salesforce based on a predefined key. This is how you can edit existing records or prevent duplicates. It’s as simple as checking a box in the connector set up to specify that you will be using, for instance, the record ID or an email address to uniquely identify the record.

Populate the Form with Salesforce Data

The counterpart of the upsert feature is the ability to populate your form with Salesforce data, from within your Salesforce account, using custom links or button. See our documentation for more information.

That’s it! Click here to visit our AppExchange listing and check out our test-drive!

The Form Builder is now in its third version, and this one is quite a dramatic improvement. Over the last two years, we’ve been methodically gathering feedback and we tried to build upon this experience to deliver the world’s best web-based form builder. Yes, I’m not even trying false modesty, so feel free to hammer us when you report bugs

Here what’s new in version 3:

1. New layout options: Label alignment, multiple-choice alignment and field delimiters.
2. New text and image section, with image upload.
3. Brand new interface and several usability improvements.
4. New form features: calculation fields and page skipping logic.

If you are not familiar with our Form Builder, check out the tour.

1. Layout Options

Layout and themes can now be adjusted independently. You can choose between three main layout options: labels above, left aligned labels, and right aligned labels. You can also adjust this setting question by question if necessary. At this time, the Form Builder is designed with left-to-right languages in mind. If you are creating forms in a right-to-left language, such as Hebrew or Arabic, we’d like to hear from you.

For multiple-choice questions you can specify if you want the choices to be listed horizontally (on the same line), or vertically (one choice per line).

Which layout is best depends on the nature of your form. The Form Builder gives you the options and lets you decide. For some insight on label placement, I highly recommend reading this usability study by Matteo Penzo.

Another addition to the Form Builder is the field delimiters, available in the question’s Advanced panel. They allow you to add text to the left and right of each field. This is useful for instance to add separators, or to display the unit for a numeric field.

2. Text and Image Section

With the new rich text editor, it is now much easier to add formatted text and images to your form. You don’t need to know HTML and you don’t need to host your images on a separate website. You can upload images and write text directly from the Form Builder.

3. Other User Interface Improvements

• Changes are applied immediately, so there are no ‘Ok’ / ‘Cancel’ buttons anymore.
• You can collapse unneeded panels to preview changes in real time.
• You can reorder and quickly import a long list of choices in multiple-choice questions.
• You can add javascript and css in the form’s advanced properties panel.
• There’s a new interactive help for a quick overview of the Form Builder.
• The preview now correctly renders HTML code in Firefox.

4. New Form Features

Form Builder 3.0 introduces calculated fields and extended support for conditionals. You can now implement a page skipping logic in a multiple-page form. These two new features will be discussed further in our next post.

If you haven’t tried the new Form Builder, give it a try now, and let us know what you think!