* FormAssembly.com published by Veer West has potential
Web forms are straightforward enough to build, but connecting them to a database and being able to store and retrieve data is something that requires a fair amount of expertise. For those people who don’t have the requisite skills, a Web-based form designer and database would be a great idea. I thought I’d found such a beast when I discovered FormAssembly.com published by Veer West.
FormAssembly provides a quite clever interface that allows you to create a form using a hierarchical layout. Under the “root” of the form you can add sections (groups of fields), questions, images, text, and predefined elements, such as a group of fields for capturing a U.S. address or a telephone number.
I say “quite clever” because the editing user interface is not quite as smooth in operation as one might hope. It uses a left hand panel to display three tabs that slide out panels to the right. The right hand area shows the form preview, which can optionally be set to automatically refresh with every change.
The first tab on the left is the Outline that shows the form’s element hierarchy. This panel supports drag and drop of the form elements so they can be re-organized, duplicated (by dropping the element on a “Copier” label at the bottom of the hierarchy), or deleted (a “Trash” label used similarly to the “Copier” label).
Dragging and dropping elements is rather tricky and using Firefox on OS X and on Windows XP I found it irritatingly easy to move elements to the wrong place. That may just be my lack of motor skill, but I think not.
Clicking on the next tab, Properties, slides a new panel to the right of the first panel and allows you to set basic attributes such as the name of elements and their type – for example for sections the types include a fieldset (a group of fields with a border, an inline section (attempts to fit a group of fields to a single row); a grid row; a page (for multi-page forms); and a folder (just groups fields for organizational purposes).
The next tab, Advanced, extends yet another panel to the right of the previous two, although any of the panels can be collapsed while any other is open. Sounds complicated? Yep, it is. But the worst part is that the panels obscure the actual form. It would have been far better to just have a single left hand panel and avoid overlaying the preview, which is crucial to see while you are building your form.
The worst thing about the tabbed panels is that they are fixed at the top of the page, so if your form is longer than one screen length you’ll have to keep scrolling up and down as you make changes and view the results.
Why would you need to pay such close attention to the results? Well, if you have any goals for the appearance of your form, you’ll want to keep and eye on how various field widths and section types affect the look and feel.
I could go on at some length about the aesthetic issues of FormAssembly, but I’m running out of space. Suffice it to say that this definitely looks like the beta version it is, and the care and attention of a graphics designer is sorely needed – no matter how much you tweak the attributes and layout the final forms all have that engineered with a knife and fork look.
Now to give FormAssembly its due it does provide customization features, but these are complex enough that it would seem to be tangential to their target market – in other words, if you can do the customizations using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript it’s likely that you can build your own database-backed forms.
I also found a problem with what is a cool feature. In FormAssembly you can define sections that can be duplicated by the user. For example, if the form is for invoices users can click on a link to add as many rows as they need for line items.
Now that’s great, but the FormAssembly system also allows for calculated fields. You can specify fields that are going to act as variables and then in the calculated fields enter a simple equation using the variable field IDs. But when you set up a duplicatable row you don’t know what the duplicates are going to be called so you can’t create a grand total field. There’s apparently no built-in function for summing variables from duplicated fields, although looking at the underlying code it is easy to see how they could do this.
In a separate area of functionality (or lack thereof) there are no useful access controls at all – either you are entering data or you are the administrator. Form data can be e-mailed to a specified address but the delivery format is just an ugly HTML or plain text message.
Oh, and the form editor is buggy. While I was testing it, every now and then it would create empty nodes in the element hierarchy, stop auto-refreshing the preview, or fail to set attributes I changed. Again, maybe, just possibly, it was my clumsiness, but I think not.
You might think I’m being very critical considering the service is in beta, but Veer West is charging for the product as it is today!
While there is a free plan it lacks export options (CSV, Excel, and XML are available in all of the other plans as are autoresponders, secure forms, file uploads, and CAPTHCA support) and the free plane is monetized through exceptionally ugly advertising that is displayed when forms are submitted.
The charged-for plans are priced on either a pay-as-you-go basis at $0.05 per response, or at $9 per month for unlimited responses, while for $34 per month you can have additional support for Salesforce, PayPal, and server script integration.
FormAssembly could be really good – you can see the potential for it to become a really powerful service – but as it stands it is hard to get too excited about it.
