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Show HN: A New Category of Web Forms

ncrafts.net

41 pointsnish150033 comments

I tried every day in August before realizing that no date in August would work. An 'x' or something or changing the icon to a cancel icon might have worked better. Also the calendar icon did absolutely nothing when clicking on it. Same thing with the email icon.

Sliders for inputting numbers? As my only option for inputting numbers? No thanks!

Yes, a better experience would be to show me in advance what dates were available, rather than letting me suffer trial and error.

Yes, disabling dates would be better. The current form uses conditional laws to show / hide fields based on the date. So, this allows me to show field set A when dates in July are selected, and field set B when dates in August are selected, and field set C when any other date is selected.

Sliders are just one of the ways of inputting numbers. You can have a text field that only accepts numbers.

A couple things I noticed:

- Validation is very slow. It was averaging out to about 5s per submission. This should be able to be done almost instantly on the front-end.

- The email input is validated with the type="email" HTML5 attribute. If you write something that doesn't pass, the notification appears (about) 400px above the form. If you write something that does pass, technically, such as "abc@abc", it is returned, by FormCraft, as invalid.

- It would be nice if the input button was clickable, although I can see that this would be more of a Bootstrap thing.

- I'm not sure how I feel about that Budget sliders reading "0-0" and, once clicked on, reading completely different numbers. If there is a minimum, why not show it?

is there any way bugs can be reported in a structured way? would be really helpful to further push this plugin, as the idea is awesome!

Thanks! I am thoroughly reading through all the comments. You can also shoot me an email nish [at] ncrafts.net

- Validation is done on the back-end. It must have been slow because of the traffic from HN :) (note to self: move to VPS)

- Will look into it

- Yes, a lot of people have pointed this out. I never thought about it. Will make this change.

- Will fix this

FYI when I click on "Try the form builder" I get a 500 internal server error

  Internal Server Error
  
  The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.

  Please contact the server administrator, webmaster@ncrafts.net and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.

  More information about this error may be available in the server error log.

  Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.
  Apache Server at ncrafts.net Port 80

The links okay. It's the heavy traffic from HN. Never dreamt of it. Please refresh.

It works! Tx! :)

There's no fallback for browsers that do not support javascript or have it disabled. That's annoying for users of special devices, NoScript, but likely also people who are blind and use screenreaders, for example.

Accessibility deserves at least to be an afterthought.

Taking away JavaScript will render 99% of the features useless. Right now I'm working alone on this, part-time. When I have the resources and time, will consider it :)

Screen readers actually execute javascript.

I've got a bit of a gripe with the "Job Application" form. Asynchronous saves aren't really intuitive to a lot of users -- if you're a web developer who understands AJAX (and the fact that there's a server with a database actually storing the data somewhere), then it makes sense. But if you're an average person who doesn't immediately know the mechanism it can be confusing. At work I recently converted a portion of our UI from this style of saving to an explicit model specifically to avoid this problem.

Agreed. It might create confusion. It's better to have a simple direction in the form that says, "Hey, your form is being saved as you type. You can always come back and fill up the rest!"

How about indicating that a day is not available before I click on it?

Wish something like this existed standalone. Not tied to wordpress.

Me too. I use Machform and love that it's not tied to WordPress, because I use ProcessWire most of the time. WordPress...sigh

I am working on a hosted, cross-platform version with tons more features :)

Very cool. I like how it works, but I'd love to know how it converted compared to other types of forms. Simply some A/B testing would do the trick, no?

It reminds me of the credit card form someone posted here, and the discussion that followed.

What a co-incidence! I was working on an A/B test to compare these forms with forms made with other form builders. Will set it up in a day or two.

Great concept. One issue with the dynamically appearing forms is you don't know how long they will go on for. This will lead to people abandoning the form even though they may be 1 step away from completion.

At every step, you can always have text like 'Q 1 of 5'

Doesn't work on my smartphone (Android stock browser).

This is odd considering the site is actually responsive. Something for the bug tracker I suppose.

Anecdote: It looks and performs horribly on my iPad. Try it in landscape...

It did not work on my iPhone either. A fly-in form larger than the screen slid into view and I found it difficult to interact with anything.

I use android phones and have found many responsive sites to be horribly slow. Scrolling is the main thing I notice, and sometimes it is so slow ijusteave the site. Unfortunately, your site was this slow. I use an HTC One with the Dolphin browser.

I also have it set to the desktop user agent instead of android, as I would rather view the desktop site than a mobile one. With the resolution on this phone, and pretty good eyesite, I find this a much better experience. Responsive sites don't seem to have a desktop option, so I'm usually left dissatisfied with them.

The page isn't responsive. The forms are. Visit ncrafts.net/a.php on your mobile device for a responsive form.

This is very cool. Good idea and good design. I wish my forms are as pretty. Good work and keep it up.

Thank you!

holy cow, this is so cool. yes a few problems but i LOVE it

Thanks

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