Feedback: PDFAmigo.com, easy, online PDF form creation | Hacker News Reader

Feedback: PDFAmigo.com, easy, online PDF form creation

10 pointsgz19 comments

Hello everyone,

I would very much appreciate your always thoughtful feedback on my web app:

http://www.pdfamigo.com

Please use the invite code "hackernews" (sans quotes.)

This is the very first public release of the app and I am sure there a lot of things to be improved and fixed. Frankly, I am feeling quite nervous submitting this for public scrutiny. At the same time I believe it's at a stage where user feedback is crucial both for fixing bugs and determining where to go from here.

I have tried to test the app with FF3.0/3.5, IE 7 and Safari 3/4. If you are using other browsers I'd love to hear about your experience. Honestly, I am not very optimistic about IE6.

Eventually, this is something I'd like to charge for. What are your thoughts on that? Would you pay a few bucks per form? Do you think a subscription model would work better? I am all ears.

Many thanks in advance.

View on HN

Don't start users with a blank sheet of paper. Give them some indication as to what to do next -- for example, starting them off with an in-progress document or giving explicit "Click this, click this, click this" direction on the sidebar.

If you're worried about screwing up their work flow you can use heuristics to figure if they're still newbies and, if so, give them the prompting. (My online app figures you're a newbie until you save your first document, and continues prompting appropriately. Five lines of Rails code plus the template, doubles the percentage of users who successfully save a card.)

Can you figure out a way to do live preview prior to hitting the Apply button? I know, having done it, that it is NO FUN whatsoever to code, but it is a HUGE win in terms of usability. Users are spoiled by years of using MS Word which gives instant visual feedback for every action -- you should try to be more like Word.

You might consider a drag&drop metaphor for putting elements on the page. At present you click a button and they get thrown into the top left corner, which might cause them to cover an element already there and will always require repositioning. This is friction, consider eliminating it.

Thank you patio11. That's a great tip (starting non-empty) - more so given that it's backed by actual data from your site.

[I have edited the following paragraph a few times revising my understanding of the definition of live-preview as I go along] With regards to the live preview: by live-preview do you mean editing the text in rich-text editor fashion within the actual page? Or, just applying attributes as they are changed in the attribute editor without the user having to click the "Apply" button? The former would be hard I guess. The latter should be easy.

Regarding element placement, it can be confusing right now. You might be scrolled down all the way, add a text field and not even notice because it's placed in the top-left corner. Drag and drop would be the way to go.

Thanks, these are subtle yet crucual points you're making - your experience is invaluable.

The UI is super slick. In that regard, I would say I like it better than something like Adobe's form Designer.

I would suggest trying to add more objects, like tables and such to make it easier for people to make the form they want. Maybe something like an option to make custom objects made of other objects? Also, being able to fill the form from existing data is useful too. If someone wants a form that dynamically grow depending on how much input there is, I'm not sure how PDFAmigo handles that, if at all. For instance something like an order form, where a user would want to be able to order 1 thing or 100 different things (which could mean multiple pages, etc...)

With all that said, this is a really nice polished product, and the interface you have so far is a pleasure to use, great job!

Boryas thanks so much for the feedback.

These are all really great points you are making. I am indeed working on adding UI features like the ones you mentioned. I just want to make sure that they are built on solid foundations and that's why I asked for feedback at this point in time.

As for the 1 vs 100 lines in a text field, good observation. It is an omission on my behalf as I forgot to enable multiline text fields. I will fix it asap.

Thanks again!

I'm wondering: what's your target audience? That would influence my suggestions. But generally I'd strongly second the "don't start with blank page."

Would a few examples of a range of possible end products possible (even just screen shots) help noobs envision the usefulness of it. [sorry if that's getting you into marketing issues (?prematurely?).]

Maybe noobs could even be shown an editable example (eventually: several examples to choose from - templates essentially) to play around with: i.e., a "sandbox".

Nice work!

Hmmm, good question. I think my target audience may be a bit too broad (I hope!) to define... but I am sure there is a lot of companies that produce PDF forms all the time. So, in a sense, I am mostly targeting businesses rather than individuals.

In any case, form examples, screenshots, etc are an absolute necessity so thanks for pointing that out.

Yes, good luck with it. A challenging project to bite off without a doubt - but some awesome potential.

I whipped up a quick sample and tried to save the PDF, but it came out corrupted (Preview refused to open it). Here's the document I made: http://www.pdfamigo.com/edit?document_id=aghwZGZhbWlnb3IOCxI...

In case it's useful to you, here's the PDF that it generated: http://files.getdropbox.com/u/2779/pdfamigo.pdf

Thanks a lot. That's very useful. I've mainly used Acrobat Reader to test the generated PDFs but they should really work everywhere.

Just an update: I have fixed this and your PDFs should work with Preview now. I had accidentally commented out a fairly crucial line of code residing very close to a not so crucial line of code... ugh.

Having said that, Preview is not the best in rendering PDF forms unfortunately...

If you're going to have a show gridlines option (Good Thing), you should probably have a snap to grid option for the form elements, so people don't have to stare at the screen and jiggle their mouse to make it all line up.

I tried to implement that using jquery but it proved to be tricky. Still, no excuse. It's on the todo list! Thank you.

I think there is a usecase/market where you offer an HTML-Interface to the form and save/send the results as pdf. Imagine a job-application form at a big company where the applicants can fill the form online but the HR guys get mailed a pdf (which they are used to). Maybe its out of scope for this site, but if you have the technology you may start another one.

Your suggestion is spot on. Form distribution and data collection is part of the plan. This is one of the features I am thinking of charging for.

The tricky part I believe is secure handling of user data as these form can contain sensitive stuff...

link: http://www.pdfamigo.com

Simple and intuitive. The UI is fast. Not much more to ask.

You should submit it to http://AppUseful.com

Thanks for the suggestion. Will do.

Better if possible to group multiple choices and rename fields.

Best,

Thanks for the feedback. Great idea for streamlining the UI.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com