Wufoo and SurveyMonkey at SXSW 2012
By Chris Coyier · March 5th, 2012
Some of us folks from Team Wufoo and Team SurveyMonkey are headed to Austin, Texas this year for the annual mega tech gathering that is SXSW Interactive. The best thing about this year: we’re having a party! We want to meet you folks, talk tech, and knock a few back. Free food, free drinks, free swag, and free good company. If you’re going to be an Austin and would like to come, just RSVP here and then come on by.
Everyone from the 2012 BarCamp Tour is also going to be there. We’re doing a panel called 5 Brands Travel the US Inspiring Entrepreneurship in which we’ll be talking about last year’s BarCamp Tour. How we did it, what worked, what didn’t, and all sorts of interesting things we learned. We don’t have any specific plans to do a BarCamp meetup, but we’ll all be there hanging out together so follow @BarCampTour on Twitter and perhaps we’ll do some impromptu stuff.
Wufoo’s own Kevin Hale will also be doing some mentoring at SXSW. If you’d like to get some one-on-one time with Kevin, you can schedule a seven minute session here.
Hope to meet some Wufoo and SurveyMonkey users in Austin!
Entries: An iPad App for Making Wufoo Forms Easier to Fill Out
By Chris Coyier · March 5th, 2012
The fine folks over at Overcommited have created a really neat iPad app called Entries that makes it easier for forms to be filled out on Apple’s tablet. Wufoo forms already look and work well on the iPad out of the box, but Entries takes things a step further by taking advantage iPad-specific controls and redesigning and reformatting the form layout so that it’s catered to the touch experience.
Entries is especially useful for any organizations and teams that both build and fill out their own forms for data entry. Perhaps you are a student who uses Wufoo forms to take notes. Perhaps you take orders or conduct polls in person by filling out a form. Perhaps you are running a conference and plan to gather feedback via a kiosk with an embedded iPad and Wufoo form. Then Entries would be the ideal solution for bringing the magic of Wufoo to your situation.
Entries is available right now and you can get it for $24.99 from the iTunes Store.
The images above highlight some of Entries cool features: contextual date pickers, simple multiple choice question turned into big toggle buttons rather than radio buttons, and more complex multiple choice questions getting bigger easier-to-tap targets. Entries even supports proper error messaging for things like missing required fields.
Thanks
Big thanks to Harold Emsheimer, Jonathan Younger, and the whole team over at Overcommitted for their excellent work on this app.
For the developer-curious, Entries uses the Login API to make authenticating through Wufoo possible, the Forms API to see the users forms, the Fields API to see the structure, and the Entries API for submitting new form data.
Giveaway
We’re going to give away a few free copies of the app! To win, just leave a comment below (using your real email, we’ll never publish it) with a little bit about why this app might be useful to you.
We’re Hitting The Road Again for BarCamp Tour 2012!
By Chris Coyier · February 17th, 2012
Last year we got together with some of our best friends and helped out nine different BarCamps all across the United States. We did whatever we could to help make the event as great as possible, from throwing the pre or after parties, to helping out with things on the day of the event, to giving talks ourselves on our own areas of expertise.
This year we’re doing it again! Together with MailChimp, BatchBook, and Grasshopper we are: BarCamp Tour 2012!
Never heard of a BarCamp? They call themselves the “unconference”. Instead of expensive conferences with exclusive speakers, BarCamps are typically free to attend and the speakers are the attendees themselves! At the beginning of the day, people post what they’d like to do a session about on a big gridded board. Attendees visit the board to see what sessions they’d like to attend at any given time. Sessions are usually loosely centered around technology.
Can we help your community’s BarCamp?
Since BarCamps are free or very inexpensive to attend, the organizers usually wrassle up community support and rely on sponsors to help make things happen with a small budget. That’s where we can come in! If you are organizing your community’s BarCamp we can help you with whatever you need the most. Just head on over to the 2012 BarCamp Tour website and fill out the form. We’ll get back to you as soon as we can about what we can do.
Hope to see you on the road
Keep an eye on the site. We’ll be updating it with the schedule for what cities we’ll be at and when. We’d very much love to see you there!
Holy Fiesta! Bienvenido Wufoo Español!
By Kevin Hale · February 16th, 2012We are excited to announce that after months of listening to tapes and practicing with flashcards, Wufoo is now bilingual! If you look at the footer, you’ll see a new dropdown that will allow you to access Wufoo Español, a Spanish version of our site and app!
Just to be clear, while the forms you built in Wufoo have been available to your users in 46 different languages for awhile now, our marketing, support and application was all only available to English speaking users up until yesterday. With the addition of Wufoo Español and a dedicated support team to deliver the same level of service many of you have come to expect, we’re delighted to be able to open up Wufoo properly to our Spanish speaking friends.
To access Wufoo Español, it’s really easy. If you live in a Spanish speaking country or your system is setup to be localized in Spanish, we will do our best to automatically detect your preference and redirect you appropriately. Otherwise, you can always flip the switch using the Preferred Language dropdown at the bottom of the site.
And for those of you worried about the essence of Wufoo being lost in translation, I can assure you that we spent a lot of work to make sure it’s just as much fun in Español as it is in English. For example, instead of our beloved Shakespeare quotes, you’ll see some choice lines from Don Quixote!
Currently, Wufoo Español is located on the Mexican domain name at wufoo.com.mx, however, we do have plans to roll out additional localized versions for Spain and Argentia.
Another thing to be aware of is that the prices on our plans are still in U.S. dollars. We just want you all to know that we are planning and actively working on offering our services in the appropriate foreign currencies as well. Be patient, and we’ll be sure to let you know when we can offer plans in your preferred denominations.
Obviously, a conversion like this could not have been pulled off so well and so quickly without a lot of talented people helping us out. While every member of the Wufoo Team needed to be involved in making Wufoo Español possible, the mastermind and architect behind our engineering transformation was done by our very own Alex Vaquez. He pretty much worked in a hole for several months all by himself to turn our PHP straw into language gold. I owe him a lot of fried ice cream for his fine work.
This is our second major collaboration with our friends on the SurveyMonkey International Team. It’s been a real delight to work with all of them on this little fiesta and so shout outs go out to Helga Wissenbach and Minna King for guiding us on our international journey.
We also want to thank Mark Elkin, Conny Hayes, Andrew Saxe and David Kim over at Smartling for helping us adapt what is a truly amazing technology. Wufoo Español would have been so much less without their involvement. High fives go out to Clover van Steenberghe, Hiroko McCoy and their army of very patient translators at ABLE for taking the time to help us translate what I do not doubt, were some very strange references and quirks.
Our ability to provide support natively in Spanish is made possible by Heather Shoemaker over at LinguistNow, who developed the technology to help us translate our documentation, and Alex Lemuz, who was graciously lent to us by SurveyMonkey to provide Wufoo support to our new Spanish users. Lemuz, along with Isabelle Galdamez also spent a lot time helping us test and identify any holes we missed as we worked through this translation.
Thanks again to anyone we might have missed here. Obviously, this is just the beginning of our international journey. Now that we’ve laid down the foundation, we’ll be hard at work bringing into the world versions of Wufoo in many other languages.
Automatically Rate the Quality of your Incoming Leads with InboundScore’s Wufoo Integration
By Chris Coyier · February 15th, 2012
Wufoo forms are really great at collecting leads and letting you know when they come in via our real time notification system. However, the hard work often starts after collection when you have to go through them one by one and prioritize which leads deserve your time and resources first.
Thankfully, our new integration with InboundScore will help make this process or triaging leads a lot easier. You can now have lots of really valuable additional information appended to Wufoo leads with publicly available information gathered from the great wide Internet automatically. With InboundScore, you can have social media profiles, job titles, bios and even insight and analysis on whether the lead is a potential decision maker at their organization attached to the data collected by Wufoo.
Making it Work
Make sure you have the essentials. You’ll need a Wufoo account and an InboundScore account.
Create a new lead generation form in Wufoo, or pick one you’ve already built that you want to integrate with InboundScore.
Follow this video tutorial on setting up the integration:
For more detailed written instructions, you can check out this tutorial on the integration. Once the integration is set up and you’ve gotten some leads, you’ll be able to see them in your InboundScore account. You can then rate your leads by sorting the table according to their InboundScore:
Thanks to Joe Fahrner and the InboundScore team for working on this integration and making it available to our users! This integration uses Wufoo’s powerful WebHooks API for passing the data between the two services.
Wufoo Forms Now More Small Screen Friendly
By Chris Coyier · February 14th, 2012There is no doubt people are using the web more and more on devices with smaller screens than you have at home on your desk, on your laptop, or even your “tablet” device. Wufoo forms already look great on the iPhone, but now we’ve recently pushed out some changes that make Wufoo forms work better on any small screen.
Hosted Wufoo Forms
For forms directly on wufoo.com, they have an appropriately sized fixed with:
But that fixed size didn’t suit small screens very well. Now we’ve tweaked things so that on smaller screens, the form simply utilizes all available width, without the spacing and background. Here’s a Wufoo form on a Galaxy Nexus:
Sexy, eh?
Embedded Wufoo Forms
Forms that you embed onto your own sites have always worked pretty well across different available widths. They simply fit snuggly into whatever horizontal space is available.
There was one little hiccup though, and that’s if the screen was resized after the page had loaded. If the screen became narrower, there was a chance that text on the form would wrap, pushing things down and sometimes, sadly, hiding the form’s vital “Submit” button.
We’ve fixed this issue, and the iframe that contains the Wufoo form will resize to the appropriate height, and the submit button will always be safely visible!
If you’d like to see this in action, visit this page and resize your browser window.
Remember, you can control the CSS!
You are ultimately in control of how your form looks. For those of you with some CSS skills, you can apply custom CSS to your form. If you have specific needs for how you’d like your form to look on screens of different sizes, you can apply responsive design techniques through your custom CSS to control that.
Wufoo gets a New Wardrobe and a Form Builder Demo
By Kevin Hale · January 31st, 2012Hey, hey, hey digital monsters! Over the weekend, we pushed out our second major redesign of the Wufoo website. There’s still a few pages that need to be converted to the new look, but we thought it would be okay to share what we have so far. You can get a good feel for the bright and shiny from our homepage and by exploring most of the links from there.
In addition to updating the aesthetic to a more contemporary look (our little login t-rex got a nice upgrade!), the new design gives us a lot more flexibility to experiment with how we visually communicate the value of Wufoo to our newest users and fans. The foundation actually sits on top of a pretty cool responsive grid system that we designed in house, which means it should look pretty good on whatever screen is front of you. And don’t worry, while we did pack it with a ton of HTML5 and CSS3 goodness, we want you to know that increased clarity was our primary objective. Here’s a few of the things we did towards that goal:
- Built a modular slideshow system to communicate news and features much easier on any landing page.
- Designed a sticky table of contents to help users deep link and navigate the content on any landing page.
- We put our new promotional video at center stage on the home and features pages.
- Revamped our Features page away from being checklist oriented and focus on highlighting how our UI benefits users directly in plain English.
Try the Form Builder Demo!
One of the new toys that comes with this redesign is the ability to play with Wufoo’s Form Builder without having to create an account. Now, you can play around with or show off how easy it is to use Wufoo without having to login or fill out a bunch of registration fields. And if you like what you see, you can easily save the work and we’ll guide you into account creation when you’re ready.
Since we’ve always been dedicated to good type design around here (our last design actually featured a font we heavily customized that’s no longer in production and therefore was unique only to our site), we were delighted to be able to use one of our favorite integration parters, Typekit, to help deliver the typographic magic. One of the nice side effects of this change is we’re not communicating text in images anymore, which is going to make it a lot easier for us to finish up our international versions of Wufoo that we’ve been furiously putting the final touches on.
Think of it as a Preview
Currently, the redesign is limited to just the marketing stuff on the site, so you won’t see anything new when you login…yet. But I want you to know that we’re definitely planning to migrate both the feel and a lot of the lessons we learned over to the application side of things in the near future. Until then, we’ll be rolling out this bad boy to our other marketing pages, blog and documentation over the next few weeks. We’re really proud of new look and hope you guys enjoy all the little touches we put into it. Please do look around and let us know what you think.
Quick Tip: How to Remove the Default Choice from a Multiple Choice Field
By Chris Coyier · January 30th, 2012When you add a multiple choice field to a form, by default, the first choice is selected. You may or may not want that for your field on your form. You can select a different default option by clicking the radio button next to a different choice, or turn off the default choice entirely by clicking the active radio button.
Note that without a default choice, no answer is still a valid choice by the user unless you specifically mark the field as required. Also note turning on and off defaults works the same way with checkbox fields.
Here’s a quick video demo:
Thanks to Eric Hansen for the idea on this quick tip!
Manage Fundraising and Donors with Little Green Light and Wufoo
By Chris Coyier · January 11th, 2012
Little Green Light is a web-based software tool built for people who do fundraising from individuals. It helps you with the big picture like managing donor lists and segements, reviewing your progress, and scheduling events. They even handle the smaller details like updating individual donor information and recording the results of a phone call.
Wufoo is all about making collecting information easier, faster, and fun through web forms. Now with the new Little Green Light and Wufoo integration, you can build your forms with Wufoo and send the information they collect over to your Little Green Light account. This works by “mapping” the fields on your Wufoo form over to where you want the data to go to in Little Green Light.
Learn how to set up this integration.
In order to use this integration, you’ll need an account on Little Green Light as well as an account on Wufoo. For the watch and learn types, here’s a video tutorial:
Thanks to Nick Bicknell and his team over at Little Green Light for creating and supporting this integration!
We love to see integrations like this that are built to work seamlessly completely from the the integrating application. In this case, it was all done through use of our Login API, Forms API, Fields API, and WebHook API. Fancy stuff.
Quick Tip: How to Export All Your Data from a Form
By Chris Coyier · January 9th, 2012You can export every single entry your Wufoo form has collected in one file. Perhaps you’ve run up against your maximum number of forms on your level of account and need to remove one to make room for another, but want to back up that data. Or say you are a spreadsheet wizard and want to do some fancy calculations with the data from there. Or perhaps you need a CSV file so you can move the form from one account to another. Well, here are the steps:
Click the Entries button underneath the form you want to export from the Form Manager. This will take you to the Entry Manager.
Click the Bulk Actions link to bring up the mass delete and export options.
Click the Export button.
Choose your file format preference: Excel (.xls), Tabs (.txt), or Commas (.csv)
And that’s it. Here’s a quick video demo showing it all in action:
