Wednesday, March 15, 2006
Wufoo: Making My Job Easier
by
Creating nice looking forms for Web sites and intranet applications is always tough with more involved than just the visual structure. A new site called Wufoo is going to help make parts of the form creation process a lot easier. The site is still in beta, so while you can use it to create a nice looking form you can’t do anything with your creation yet. Even if you have no reason to make a form I’d suggest giving the demo a try to see how nice a Web application can be to use. Web apps don’t need to be clunky, some are just built that way but not Wufoo. They’ve used a combination of Flash and Ajax to make it work and have a nice user-friendly design so even a novice can put together a good looking form.
There are a few things to like about a tool like Wufoo from the point of somebody designing user interfaces for a living. First, it let’s me quickly create a working form to demonstrate a concept to a client or co-workers. More importantly I can put together a form during a meeting and make changes on the spot. Not just a sketch or wireframe, but an actual working form that a client can immediately see and respond to. Second, it puts more power directly into the hands of clients to better express their ideas — that’s never a bad thing. Now, instead of trying to explain their needs with a poor-looking form mocked up in Word or Visio, they can use Wufoo and put their ideas into working code to show what they’re thinking.
Wufoo isn’t alone in this market but right now they’re my favorite, even if I can’t entirely use it yet. JotForm and Form Assembly are two more sites that help in the creation of forms and you can expect many more to show up. This is definitely a niche that needs to be filled as many blogs and small sites are without the resources to easily add forms to their sites. The winners will be the ones that not only let you create forms but also help collect and store the data those forms create.
Of course I’ll just be happy using the tools to make communicating with clients much easier.
