form features your application must have to scale

8 form features your product must have to scale the ever-changing world of forms

Posted at h in Developers by

While building and supporting a world-class form solution over the last few years, we have faced and overcome many challenges. We’ve seen everything from simple customer requests to large-form building projects to massive application rewrites.

This article shares the top eight features your paperless product must have to scale with the demand of need-to-have features to be successful. These tips will save your team loads of time and money.

For a more in-depth implementation of our form solution and components – check out our developer documentation.

The rise of the paperless era

A recent study by a Mainsail research firm found that in some industries, as high as 70% of companies still use physical paper forms. For software companies that offer some form of paperless solutions, this means a significant opportunity is on the horizon.

In the next five to ten years, we’ll see one of the most significant company growth opportunities. A new era is near. As the baby boomers move into retirement, handing the reins down to the next generation will naturally cause a massive demand as systems and processes are digitized.

And as we all know, GenX and Millennials are your can’t-live-without-technology generations. This new era will bring the largest generation of technology buyers the world has seen yet.

Launch a form solution into your application

If you don’t have a form solution and/or need enhancements, here, from our experience, are the top 8 features to get you started:

  1. Dynamic fields – Expand forms to desired length and width. For example, a table field needs to expand its rows and columns per document scenario dynamically.
  2. Flexible form layout and design options – Easily customize the layout and design of forms to match branding and user preferences.
  3. Conditional fields and logic – Show or hide form fields based on user input or other conditions.
  4. Electronic signatures – Collect electronic signatures from users.
  5. File upload and export capability – Allow users to upload and export files.
  6. Easy integration with other systems – Easily integrate forms with other systems, such as databases and CRMs.
  7. Security and compliance – Forms should adhere to industry-specific regulations and best practices for data privacy and security.
  8. Mobile compatibility – Forms should be optimized for use on mobile devices (with a native app or mobile browser), have productive data entry, and have a responsive design to adapt to different screen sizes. And all this should be done while online and offline.

These are just a few examples of what we experienced as the most essential for building a useful, sought-after form solution.

Final tips before launching a form solution into your application

  1. Plan ahead – Create a detailed plan outlining the priority form features, timeline, resource pull, and the steps required to produce these features.
  2. Communicate with users – Notify your users on these future features and how it will benefit them. Select a few unbias customers to be your beta testers and provide honest feedback.
  3. Measure and refine – Make improvements from your early users’ feedback.

BONUS TIP

If you are looking to add a better form solution to your application, let us help! We’ve done all the heavy lifting for you. Joyfill is an easy way to deploy a fully-featured form solution into your own application without the thousands of development hours. Happy building!