Pain Points
We learned through research that our experts wrote a decent portion of forms for customers in-house, because only certain fleets possessed knowledge of our code. We also learned that only fleets large enough to have their own IT department were writing their own code, while lots of smaller potential customers could access the feature but couldn’t make use of something so complex.
A Reimagined Experience
The new form builder offers 2 main features: Build forms through an intuitive interface, and preview those forms directly in the page, no code or tablet required. This duo eliminates most of the effort in manipulation and iteration, and brings editing times down from days to minutes.
Users not only have the flexibility to add, edit, and remove forms with simple controls, but also to edit the clean JSON that it auto-generates. Logic written in the code even behaves the same in the preview.
Drag and Drop
The new interface allows fleet managers to build complex, conditional, interactive forms without needing to write any code. At all.
Super (User) Powers
Code never went away, and users who know our schema well can still write very advanced forms with ease.
Demo
The video below shows the creation of a basic form in the builder:
Outcomes
Testing results post-release were extremely positive. Chiefly, lowering the barrier to form creation allowed regular office users of smaller fleets to harness a powerful feature without needing their own IT department. The new builder resulted in significantly faster creation times, reducing the duration from days to hours. Form quality improved, and drivers now report far fewer bugs.
The builder did more than make a significant impact on the workflow of our users. The introduction of such a simple tool has sparked marketing campaigns and helped us sign a higher volume of smaller customers, opening up a new market and shaping new features.
If you’d like to see more of my larger-scope projects, check out my pages on the Dispatch Design System or the Job Detail Page.