The internet is still mostly forms

And they still suck.

In 1997 I had AOL and I stumbled upon a pre-geocities CMS called expages. Of course, it’s now defunct, but what I had at the time was a page on the internet that was all mine. I could write anything I wanted on it, which, for a 10 year old was incredibly daunting. I think the best I could type with both index fingers was, “I like soccer,” and “girlz r weird.”

The highlight of the whole thing was the ability to drop GIFs in that had no purpose whatsoever. You may remember the dancing baby, an incredibly popular non-sequitur that graced thousands of pages across the interweb. I, however, eschewed the baby for flaming images of the word “NEW!!” from a site called BellsandWhistles.com. I’m happy to report it has since been turned into an ecommerce shop for the purchase literal bells and literal whistles.

There was one thing you never understood, but had to have. A guestbook. And, it was a form. A text input for you name, and a textarea for some serious trolling. Nothing good ever came of the guestbook. It was basically a reminder of how unpopular your one-page existence on the internet was. And if you did happen to get some guests looking to write you a note, it was probably from “Turd Ferguson.” That guy was everywhere.

But I digress.

It’s almost 20 years later, and web forms are still how serious and not-so-serious internet business is conducted. And they still suck.

Well, let’s just say most suck. Consumer apps, like Uber, Seamless, Facebook, Twitter, etc. are simply forms. You type something in, it goes somewhere, and an action may or may not be taken. But, they’re really good. There’s an incredible amount of effort into optimizing the UI for those forms, that I doubt you even think of those apps as being “form-based.” And that’s awesome.

But what about heavy duty forms? I’m talking about the massive 10-page novella you get to fill out every time you go to a new doctors office. Or, anything you do that has anything to do with the government?

Now, you might be thinking, “Well, if those organizations had better software, maybe you wouldn’t have to fill out a form at all!” And you’d be right. There’s a lot of redundant data entry that should be eliminated. But you have to get that information in there once.

My point is, whenever you find yourself staring down a web form that wasn’t built by a venture-backed startup, do you ever realize that the experience is usually the same as it was when you signed my guestbook, “Turd E. Ferguson” back in 1997. I know it was you.

Why is that?

The answer is that form design is deceptively hard.

Like, really hard. Why? Because they are tedious to build. Yes, the HTML is a pain, but where people really drop the ball is with validation. The reason is because in validation are baked all the business rules for the information you’re trying to collect, and unless you have a QA team dedicated to breaking your workflow, you’re going to miss something.

So, what is to be done about this?

Make a better form builder. Make it one that devs actually want use.

Do that by making it drag and drop to build.

Do it by making it output code.

Do it by documenting your business logic as your write your validations.

Make it easy enough that you can do it right alongside your client, and save yourself hours of corrections, because you both saw it work in real time.

I’m working on a new form builder that does these things, and helps you prototype fast. Sign up to hear about it when it’s ready.