After weeks of planning, preparation and quite a bit of backend architecture adjustment magic, the Wufoo Team is proud to announce the addition of a new field now available to all users across all plans : The Likert Field.

I know we’ve announced a lot of new stuff today, but we’re probably the most excited about this one. For those that don’t know about Likert items, Wikipedia describes the field as “a psychometic scale commonly used in questionnaires, and is the most widely used scale in survey research.” Since we strive to be the easiest way to collect information over the Internet, we thought it only appropriate to try and bring to our users the easiest way to create the most widely used scaling method for measuring bipolar responses from your users.

And our Likert field isn’t just another pretty face. She’s also very flexible and highly customizable. You can adjust the number of columns to measure up to 10 levels of assessment and we’ve even provided lots of alternative predefined levels for you to play with so you can measure not only agreement, but comparison, importance and even satisfaction of the statements you want your users to assess.

Adding statements to your Likert field should also be very easy and familiar. It’s based on the UI we use for creating choices for dropdown and multiple choice fields. Also, with a single click you can hide the values beneath the radio fields or add a Non Applicable column if you want to grant the user a way to definitively show a withholding of opinion when making your Likert field required. Like checkbox choices, please be aware that each statement in a likert field is counted as an individual field and will count against the total field count for the form.

And because we’re devoted not only to user friendly inputs, but beautiful ones as well, we’ve taken additional steps to ensure that a Wufoo Likert field will look great on a wide variety of themes and web sites. Using the same color contrasting formula that we developed for our new graphing system, Wufoo will automatically adjust the border and zebra colors of the field to match and be visible against any form background color that you choose, that includes both light and dark ones.

And that’s it for all the new goodies. We’re really proud of this implementation and are hoping you’ll be just as excited to use it. We can’t wait to see how you’ll use Likert to create better and more powerful surveys to make better and more informed decisions.

And the hits just keep on coming. Not wanting to leave our dear Form Builder left out of these new improvements, Ryan’s been staying up late rewriting our favorite piece of code for the umpteenth time. In addition to some cosmetic UI adjustments from me, the Form Builder got a complete rewrite of the underlying engine that creates the scripts and databases that power every Wufoo form.

Based on the new API that was reworked by Tim, the new builder is streamlined for additional speed (yes, it’s even faster than before) and sports a vastly improved error handling system to prevent database corruption from happening when things go wrong. But even more exciting for our users, Ryan tossed in the following upgrades to the multiple choice field.

As you can see, we’ve ported over the Bulk Add interface from the Dropdown field over to the Multiple Choice field. Now you can add a block of custom choices all at once through the lightbox interface and even utilize the predefined options that’s provided by the builder.

We’ve also added an “Allow Other” option in the field settings, so you can provide your users a way to enter their own custom answer to a question if none of the choices you provide them in the field fits their fancy. When you check this option, Wufoo will add a choice to the bottom of your choices with a labeled text input. What’s nice about the way we’ve implemented it here is that you can customize this label as you see fit and don’t have to leave it as “Other.” Note, however, that if this choice is selected, but no value is entered by the user, the label value will be submitted instead.

There’s also some nice touches to the way we’ve implemented this field in public forms. For example, we’ve added some scripting so that if you select the radio or label for the “Other” choice, the text field will automatically be focused and ready for text input. Additionally, if you select the text input for direct typing, the radio selection will automatically be selected. We think it’s the little touches like these that make all the difference for your users filling out the form and we hope you and your users enjoy these new form builder and field upgrades.

Over the last few months, we’ve had the two new faces of Wufoo (Tim and Alex) hard at work helping us rewrite and clean up Wufoo’s underlying code. Tim’s been putting the final touches on the 2.0 version of our API, which we’re hoping to unleash upon the public soon, and Alex has been laying the groundwork for a complete transformation of our reporting system. While most of their work has been focused on replicating current features using this new API, we’d like to take some time to highlight some new goodness they’ve been able to squeeze into Wufoo Reports.

Tab Delimited Export

In addition to completely refactoring the code used to export your Wufoo data to Excel and CSV formats, Tim’s added a text file export to the system so you can share and import your data via a tab delimited format.

The new export system is also a lot more robust and a better friend to foreign characters collected by your Wufoo forms.

Single Entry View

Because it’s such a hit in our Entry Manager, Alex ported over the read-only format used to display data both there and in email notifications to the newly programmed datagrid in reports.

Now, when you set up the datagrid to show only 1 entry at a time, it’ll show it in this improved single entry view as opposed to an awkward single rowed table.

Again, this is just a start of some big changes we’re making to Wufoo’s reporting system. Tim and Alex have a lot more up their sleeves and we look forward to seeing their contributions manifest in the months ahead.

Thanks to the good word put out by all of our users (really, thank you so much guys), Wufoo’s been growing at a good clip. Our community of empowered form builders just past 125,000 users today and we’re on pace to process 1 million entries this month alone. All this growth on your end means we’ve got to grow on our end and so this week we’ll be putting the finishing touches on some sweet new gear we’ve added to Wufoo’s arsenal of form processing firepower.

With the help of our dear friends over at Bitpusher, we’ve installed a new database server, web server and a lot more memory to our lineup that’s already improved page load times by about 15%. These hardware improvements were coupled with extensive backend rewrites on our end that’s also reduced the amount of resources we were using to call and enter data. For example, on fairly large forms, we’ve dramatically optimized the number of queries needed to show and process pages with lots of fields.

In addition to the new hardware, we’ve also implemented some security measures that will make using Wufoo in public wifi settings a lot more safe. The login system now uses a secure cookie system to protect sensitive administrative areas on Wufoo from any kind of session hijacking attack.

I’ll be talking about some more goodies here very shortly, but these changes and updates are part of a new foundation we’re laying down for Wufoo’s continued improvement. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be making more optimizations to the system to make sure Wufoo is running as fast as you’ve come to expect of it. Thanks again to all our users for helping us get to this point and we hope you enjoy the boost.