We’re thrilled to announce JotForm Mobile Forms, a reimagined take on mobile data collection. We didn’t want to make an app just to review submission information; we wanted to create a mobile platform with robust forms that work anywhere.
And we’re happy to say, we nailed it.
It would be a mistake to simply call JotForm Mobile Forms the app version of JotForm, because it’s more than that. It’s a whole new product designed to break free from the limitations on when and where you can collect the data that matters to your organization.
JotForm Mobile Forms was an undertaking over a year in the making. Our user research and product teams took a deep dive into learning what our users wanted to see.
So let’s get started with profiles of the users and industries that will enjoy JotForm Mobile Forms as well as some tips on how they can make the most of this new product.
Have your employees ever needed to collect data in remote places without an internet connection? Do they have to deal with a constant flow of feedback from customers?
It’s tough to gather data and respond to customers using traditional paper forms. But thanks to the mobile apps listed below, your data-collection process will be smoother than ever before.
Whether you’re generating leads, getting customer feedback, or conducting an inspection in the field, mobile form apps will allow you to collect more accurate data and to do it whenever and wherever you want. In turn, this will lead to increased company productivity and better overall performance.
Here are the mobile form apps you should check out:
JotForm Mobile Forms
JotForm has taken a big step toward making data collection easier with its new mobile app, JotForm Mobile Forms. The app allows you to create, view, fill out, and share forms on your mobile device. JotForm Mobile Forms also comes with many advanced features, like geolocation, voice recording, photo capture, and e-signatures, all of which will help you collect more accurate and detailed information.
If you work with a team, JotForm Mobile Forms makes collaboration easy. You can assign forms to your team members and customize notifications.
JotForm’s mobile app also offers kiosk mode, which locks the screen of your device so that form respondents can’t access anything but your form. Kiosk mode also automatically refreshes the form after each response so that you can collect data in a continuous fashion.
The best thing about JotForm Mobile Forms, however, is that you can collect data even if you lose or can’t find an internet connection. The app’s offline mode allows you to view and organize your forms, and lets people fill them out. When you reconnect to the internet, your form submissions will automatically sync.
That’s not all. JotForm Mobile Forms is completely free of charge. You can download it anytime for Android and iOS devices.
Brew Survey
When it comes to survey apps, Brew Survey offers most of the basic features, such as offline data collection, customizable design, conditional logic, and more. Brew Survey allows you to create smooth and easy-to-use surveys and collect unlimited form responses.
The app doesn’t allow you to create forms on your mobile device, but once you’ve created them on your browser, you can access and fill them out on the mobile app. Form responses sync manually from the app so that you can view them in your reports.
Brew Survey stands out among its competitors for its super cost-effective plan that includes access to full features for only $10 per month. Considering the cost of competitors with similar features, it’s a bargain for sure.
Survey Sparrow
If you’re looking for a survey app that work with tons of integrations, you’ve come to the right place. SurveySparrow provides integrations that allow you to create powerful surveys and enhance the customer experience. Zapier, Salesforce, and Mailchimp are just a few of the integrations available to help with management and to collect and analyze customer feedback.
You can create forms only on a browser, but you can access them on both a browser and the mobile app. SurveySparrow allows you to collect data in a smart and visually pleasing way with its various logic features and the ability to personalize forms.
The product is available only for Android for now.
SurveySparrow plans vary according to the features offered, starting from $19 per month. If you need more advanced features and higher survey limits, you can always sign up for enterprise and premium plans, for $39 per month per user and $49 per month respectively.
Tabsurvey
The Tabsurvey app comes with many advanced survey features, such as downloadable submissions and live reports that will help you develop powerful insights. You can set access to surveys based on the role of each employee, and you can create and update surveys from afar by using the location manager.
Tabsurvey outshines competitors with its iPad monitor feature, which allows enterprise users to control their devices remotely. This feature prompts users when their devices go offline.
Tabsurvey is only available for iPad devices.
You can subscribe to Tabsurvey on a monthly or yearly basis — the latter will save you 16 percent. In addition to the free trial, which includes a maximum of 200 submissions, basic, pro, and enterprise plans are available; they cost $22, $44, and $79 respectively. If you need to use the app on multiple devices, you can always add one for a fee of $10 per month.
Netigate
Netigate provides a tool that makes it easier to analyze and develop insights from survey data. Equipped with advanced survey features and a user-friendly interface, Netigate allows you to collect feedback from customers and measure their loyalty with a Net Promoter Score feature.
You can’t build forms on your mobile device with Netigate, but you can create them on your computer by choosing from six survey templates.
Whether you’re a startup or a large corporation, you can also benefit from managed services — a team of researchers and experts that provides strategic consultancy to your firm. You’re not only able to collect data from your customers or employees through Netigate; you can also learn how to use the data you collect in a way that boosts your company’s bottom line.
You can start your 30-day trial anytime. If you’re looking for different plans with various features, you can contact the Netigate support team to get detailed information on pricing.
QuestionPro
The QuestionPro mobile app has all the features you expect from a survey app — personalization, piping, offline data collection, kiosk mode, and more. While you can create forms and surveys only on a browser, you can always access forms from your app, and users can fill out forms on the app.
If you’re looking to capture leads, QuestionPro offers strong integrations, like Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics. QuestionPro’s intuitive kiosk feature will also be helpful for your lead-generation efforts.
You need to upgrade to a paid subscription when your 14-day free trial ends. You can upgrade to a professional or corporate plan anytime for just $15 and $75 per month respectively. If you require more advanced features, contact the QuestionPro team about enterprise editions.
QuestionPro’s support team is available 24-7 in case of any issues.
Survey2Connect
Survey2Connect provides dynamic, responsive design and highly elaborate data analysis. Getting customer feedback is hard; turning the data you collect into something actionable is even harder.
Thanks to Survey2Connect’s sentiment analysis and predictive analysis, you will not only gather customer feedback but also obtain future-oriented analysis that will allow you to take appropriate action.
Dashboards and reports deliver intelligible and visualized information about where to focus for further improvement. In addition to these analytical tools, the ticketing module allows you to take care of individual customer complaints.
While the SME – CX plan is the most popular, with a monthly fee of $799, you can always start with a basic plan that costs only $249 per month. Survey2Connect has enterprise plan as well.
GoFormz
GoFormz has a virtuous mission when it comes to creating forms and surveys: going paperless. To this end, they offer a feature that allows you to convert all of your paper forms into mobile forms at no charge.
While you can create new forms from existing templates and convert paper forms only in your browser, the GoFormz mobile app makes data collection easier with advanced form features like geolocation, cloud storage, and auto calculation.
You can try the advanced edition as part of a free 14-day trial. The GoFormz team plan costs $18 per month; the advanced plan, $30 per month; the premier plan, $60 per month; and the enterprise plan, $120 per user per month. You can save money by purchasing an annual subscription.
NestForms
NestForms is the data-collection app of choice for environmental organizations that conduct nature-related surveys.
NestForms allows you to collect data in remote places with its offline feature, get location data with its GPS feature, and review and analyze submissions with graphical charts. All you need to do is to create your forms on your laptop or desktop and send them to the mobile app.
NestForms is available on both Android and iOS devices.
After the 14-day free trial ends, you can sign up for one of the NestForms paid subscriptions, which range from the standard plan for $12.95 per month to the premium plan at $129.95 per month. You can always increase storage limits and the number of users if you need more.
Inbook
A review is a gift, as inBook says. If you value customer feedback and want to improve the customer experience, inBook can help by enabling you to collect data simply and quickly.
inBook surveys allow you to create multiple question types, from star ratings to smiley emojis. After you create forms on your computer, you can access them on your mobile device.
You can also collect customer feedback in offline mode. Everything will be saved on your device and will sync when you’re back online.
inBook’s pricing structure is as simple as its interface. When your 30-day trial is over, you can upgrade to a paid plan, which costs $19 for one device per month. You can get a 10-percent discount if you have a yearly subscription.
Feed2Go
Feed2Go is an iPad-only app that allows you to create and analyze surveys on your tablet. The Feed2Go app has a simple and user-friendly interface and includes kiosk mode, offline data collection, reports based on submissions, and emoticons and impressions, all of which will simplify your interviews and surveys.
Feed2Go also has options to highlight selected questions and to show one question per page in order to help customers complete your survey. You don’t need to pay anything, or even register, to benefit from all of these features. You can always unlock pro functionality through in-app purchases to increase the number of available questionnaire templates.
Indition
Indition provides software products and services to e-commerce professionals and marketers. Their online form-building product allows you to create forms on your computer and collect responses through your Apple device. Thanks to the image upload and e-signature features, the Indition mobile app is ideal for trade shows and conferences, where you need to collect multiple types of data from your customers.
The Indition mobile app is available only for iOS devices. To use it, you need to upgrade to a platinum account for a monthly $85 fee.
FormTabApp
The FormTab app eases the process of collecting data from multiple form submissions. Specializing in data security, FormTab stores all form submissions in the cloud and makes them accessible only to your employees. After building forms on your desktop, you can access them with the FormTab app.
The app is valuable for those who work in the field. Practical solutions, like offline mode and the capability to assign specific forms to different departments, make it great for teams as well. FormTab has many integration partners, such as Dropbox and Google Drive.
FormTab offers two different plans: the self-starter package, which costs $11 per month per user, and the professional plan, which costs $17 per month per user. You can contact the FormTab sales team for details about their enterprise plans.
To wrap up, these apps will provide you with a smooth data-collection process, which is helpful for any business. Let us know in the comments which other mobile apps we should include on the list.
Have your employees ever needed to collect data in remote places without an internet connection? Do they have to deal with a constant flow of feedback from customers?
It’s tough to gather data and respond to customers using traditional paper forms. But thanks to the mobile apps listed below, your data-collection process will be smoother than ever before.
Whether you’re generating leads, getting customer feedback, or conducting an inspection in the field, mobile form apps will allow you to collect more accurate data and to do it whenever and wherever you want. In turn, this will lead to increased company productivity and better overall performance.
Here are the mobile form apps you should check out:
JotForm Mobile Forms
JotForm has taken a big step toward making data collection easier with its new mobile app, JotForm Mobile Forms. The app allows you to create, view, fill out, and share forms on your mobile device. JotForm Mobile Forms also comes with many advanced features, like geolocation, voice recording, photo capture, and e-signatures, all of which will help you collect more accurate and detailed information.
If you work with a team, JotForm Mobile Forms makes collaboration easy. You can assign forms to your team members and customize notifications.
JotForm’s mobile app also offers kiosk mode, which locks the screen of your device so that form respondents can’t access anything but your form. Kiosk mode also automatically refreshes the form after each response so that you can collect data in a continuous fashion.
The best thing about JotForm Mobile Forms, however, is that you can collect data even if you lose or can’t find an internet connection. The app’s offline mode allows you to view and organize your forms, and lets people fill them out. When you reconnect to the internet, your form submissions will automatically sync.
That’s not all. JotForm Mobile Forms is completely free of charge. You can download it anytime for Android and iOS devices.
Brew Survey
When it comes to survey apps, Brew Survey offers most of the basic features, such as offline data collection, customizable design, conditional logic, and more. Brew Survey allows you to create smooth and easy-to-use surveys and collect unlimited form responses.
The app doesn’t allow you to create forms on your mobile device, but once you’ve created them on your browser, you can access and fill them out on the mobile app. Form responses sync manually from the app so that you can view them in your reports.
Brew Survey stands out among its competitors for its super cost-effective plan that includes access to full features for only $10 per month. Considering the cost of competitors with similar features, it’s a bargain for sure.
Survey Sparrow
If you’re looking for a survey app that work with tons of integrations, you’ve come to the right place. SurveySparrow provides integrations that allow you to create powerful surveys and enhance the customer experience. Zapier, Salesforce, and Mailchimp are just a few of the integrations available to help with management and to collect and analyze customer feedback.
You can create forms only on a browser, but you can access them on both a browser and the mobile app. SurveySparrow allows you to collect data in a smart and visually pleasing way with its various logic features and the ability to personalize forms.
The product is available only for Android for now.
SurveySparrow plans vary according to the features offered, starting from $19 per month. If you need more advanced features and higher survey limits, you can always sign up for enterprise and premium plans, for $39 per month per user and $49 per month respectively.
Tabsurvey
The Tabsurvey app comes with many advanced survey features, such as downloadable submissions and live reports that will help you develop powerful insights. You can set access to surveys based on the role of each employee, and you can create and update surveys from afar by using the location manager.
Tabsurvey outshines competitors with its iPad monitor feature, which allows enterprise users to control their devices remotely. This feature prompts users when their devices go offline.
Tabsurvey is only available for iPad devices.
You can subscribe to Tabsurvey on a monthly or yearly basis — the latter will save you 16 percent. In addition to the free trial, which includes a maximum of 200 submissions, basic, pro, and enterprise plans are available; they cost $22, $44, and $79 respectively. If you need to use the app on multiple devices, you can always add one for a fee of $10 per month.
Netigate
Netigate provides a tool that makes it easier to analyze and develop insights from survey data. Equipped with advanced survey features and a user-friendly interface, Netigate allows you to collect feedback from customers and measure their loyalty with a Net Promoter Score feature.
You can’t build forms on your mobile device with Netigate, but you can create them on your computer by choosing from six survey templates.
Whether you’re a startup or a large corporation, you can also benefit from managed services — a team of researchers and experts that provides strategic consultancy to your firm. You’re not only able to collect data from your customers or employees through Netigate; you can also learn how to use the data you collect in a way that boosts your company’s bottom line.
You can start your 30-day trial anytime. If you’re looking for different plans with various features, you can contact the Netigate support team to get detailed information on pricing.
QuestionPro
The QuestionPro mobile app has all the features you expect from a survey app — personalization, piping, offline data collection, kiosk mode, and more. While you can create forms and surveys only on a browser, you can always access forms from your app, and users can fill out forms on the app.
If you’re looking to capture leads, QuestionPro offers strong integrations, like Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics. QuestionPro’s intuitive kiosk feature will also be helpful for your lead-generation efforts.
You need to upgrade to a paid subscription when your 14-day free trial ends. You can upgrade to a professional or corporate plan anytime for just $15 and $75 per month respectively. If you require more advanced features, contact the QuestionPro team about enterprise editions.
QuestionPro’s support team is available 24-7 in case of any issues.
Survey2Connect
Survey2Connect provides dynamic, responsive design and highly elaborate data analysis. Getting customer feedback is hard; turning the data you collect into something actionable is even harder.
Thanks to Survey2Connect’s sentiment analysis and predictive analysis, you will not only gather customer feedback but also obtain future-oriented analysis that will allow you to take appropriate action.
Dashboards and reports deliver intelligible and visualized information about where to focus for further improvement. In addition to these analytical tools, the ticketing module allows you to take care of individual customer complaints.
While the SME – CX plan is the most popular, with a monthly fee of $799, you can always start with a basic plan that costs only $249 per month. Survey2Connect has enterprise plan as well.
GoFormz
GoFormz has a virtuous mission when it comes to creating forms and surveys: going paperless. To this end, they offer a feature that allows you to convert all of your paper forms into mobile forms at no charge.
While you can create new forms from existing templates and convert paper forms only in your browser, the GoFormz mobile app makes data collection easier with advanced form features like geolocation, cloud storage, and auto calculation.
You can try the advanced edition as part of a free 14-day trial. The GoFormz team plan costs $18 per month; the advanced plan, $30 per month; the premier plan, $60 per month; and the enterprise plan, $120 per user per month. You can save money by purchasing an annual subscription.
NestForms
NestForms is the data-collection app of choice for environmental organizations that conduct nature-related surveys.
NestForms allows you to collect data in remote places with its offline feature, get location data with its GPS feature, and review and analyze submissions with graphical charts. All you need to do is to create your forms on your laptop or desktop and send them to the mobile app.
NestForms is available on both Android and iOS devices.
After the 14-day free trial ends, you can sign up for one of the NestForms paid subscriptions, which range from the standard plan for $12.95 per month to the premium plan at $129.95 per month. You can always increase storage limits and the number of users if you need more.
Inbook
A review is a gift, as inBook says. If you value customer feedback and want to improve the customer experience, inBook can help by enabling you to collect data simply and quickly.
inBook surveys allow you to create multiple question types, from star ratings to smiley emojis. After you create forms on your computer, you can access them on your mobile device.
You can also collect customer feedback in offline mode. Everything will be saved on your device and will sync when you’re back online.
inBook’s pricing structure is as simple as its interface. When your 30-day trial is over, you can upgrade to a paid plan, which costs $19 for one device per month. You can get a 10-percent discount if you have a yearly subscription.
Feed2Go
Feed2Go is an iPad-only app that allows you to create and analyze surveys on your tablet. The Feed2Go app has a simple and user-friendly interface and includes kiosk mode, offline data collection, reports based on submissions, and emoticons and impressions, all of which will simplify your interviews and surveys.
Feed2Go also has options to highlight selected questions and to show one question per page in order to help customers complete your survey. You don’t need to pay anything, or even register, to benefit from all of these features. You can always unlock pro functionality through in-app purchases to increase the number of available questionnaire templates.
Indition
Indition provides software products and services to e-commerce professionals and marketers. Their online form-building product allows you to create forms on your computer and collect responses through your Apple device. Thanks to the image upload and e-signature features, the Indition mobile app is ideal for trade shows and conferences, where you need to collect multiple types of data from your customers.
The Indition mobile app is available only for iOS devices. To use it, you need to upgrade to a platinum account for a monthly $85 fee.
FormTabApp
The FormTab app eases the process of collecting data from multiple form submissions. Specializing in data security, FormTab stores all form submissions in the cloud and makes them accessible only to your employees. After building forms on your desktop, you can access them with the FormTab app.
The app is valuable for those who work in the field. Practical solutions, like offline mode and the capability to assign specific forms to different departments, make it great for teams as well. FormTab has many integration partners, such as Dropbox and Google Drive.
FormTab offers two different plans: the self-starter package, which costs $11 per month per user, and the professional plan, which costs $17 per month per user. You can contact the FormTab sales team for details about their enterprise plans.
To wrap up, these apps will provide you with a smooth data-collection process, which is helpful for any business. Let us know in the comments which other mobile apps we should include on the list.
Every week users submit a lot of interesting stuff on our sister site Webdesigner News, highlighting great content from around the web that can be of interest to web designers.
The best way to keep track of all the great stories and news being posted is simply to check out the Webdesigner News site, however, in case you missed some here’s a quick and useful compilation of the most popular designer news that we curated from the past week.
Note that this is only a very small selection of the links that were posted, so don’t miss out and subscribe to our newsletter and follow the site daily for all the news.
How to Design for the Web in 2019
Write HTML like it’s 1999
A Simple Guide to Design Thinking
Why Text Buttons Hurt Mobile Usability
CodyHouse Framework 2.0
Colors in UI Design — Theory, Psychology & Practice
Birth of Our New Design System
This Page is a Truly Naked, Brutalist Html Quine.
Milkshake – Make Websites from your Phone
Different Faces of Gamification in Web Design
Why Dark Gray is Brighter than Gray on the Web
A Future Design Tool with Git-like Asset Versioning
Firefox’s Bold New Branding is a Glimpse into Mozilla’s Grand Plan
Introducing Sideway
The State of CSS 2019
Your Website Content Migration Checklist
Gmail’s Dynamic Emails Roll Out to all Users on July 2
Typography for AR Interfaces
The Must-Have Elements of a Successful SEO Strategy
What I Learned from Rebranding a Company in 3 Months
The New Mac Pro is a Design Remix
This Just Might Be the World’s Most Beautiful Refrigerator
Designing for the User’s Emotional Journey
User Experience Is… User Research
To Be Great, Be Good Repeatably
Want more? No problem! Keep track of top design news from around the web with Webdesigner News.
All the modern JavaScript frameworks are component-based. Even when they disagree with each other about specific things (like how Svelterequires compilation), they all seem to agree on the model of working in components. React is all components. A popular static site generator for React is Next.js. The Vue version of that is Nuxt.js.
Then there is Gatsby which is all React. (Listen to our latest ShopTalk Show as we discuss it.) Gridsome seems like the most 1-to-1 comparison in Vue-land, the notable comparison being how they both are designed to suck in data from any source. Components though, of course. I’m not sure there is a flagship Angular-based static site generator, but they are out there, and Angular is components all the way down.
Components are so ubiquitous that perhaps you don’t even think about it anymore. But you might feel it, particularly if you jump back and forth between projects that aren’t component-driven. WordPress development, generally, I feel, isn’t component driven. Sure, you’ve got your header.php and footer.php files and such. You can break those apart however you want, but it’s rather ad-hoc. You aren’t explicitly building components and feeding those components local data and testing them as such. (You can get a lot closer with something like Timber.)
Building front-ends out of server-side code is absolutely fine. Server-side rendering is rife with advantages. But server-side languages don’t seem to have embraced components the way JavaScript has. And since everyone seems to like components (front-end devs obviously love it, designers think that way anyway, back-end devs understand it…) it’s no surprise to me to see this surge of beloved projects build server-side (or build-time) generated sites from JavaScript, simply because it’s component-based and components are just a good idea.
Šime posts regular content for web developers on webplatform.news.
In this week’s roundup, Chrome is adding an install option for Progressive Web Apps, Opera GX comes to Windows, the ECMAScript proposals get an update, and CSS Scroll Snap is coming to a Firefox browser near you.
An install icon is coming to Chrome on desktop
Pete LePage: The next version of Chrome will automatically show an install icon in the address bar on desktop if the site meets Chrome’s PWA “installability” criteria. You can listen for the appinstalled event to detect if the user installed your PWA.
Opera GX is available on Windows
Maciej Kocemba: The preview version of Opera GX for Windows is now available. This is a special version of Opera that lets users limit how much CPU and RAM is available to the browser.
Updated ECMAScript proposals
Azu The JavaScript optional chaining operator (obj?.prop) and null-ish coalescing operator (x ?? y) proposals have been moved to Stage 2 of the TC39 process. (See Web Platform News issue 902 for more information about the TC39 process.)
// BEFORE
let text = response.settings && response.settings.headerText;
if (text == null) text = "Hello, world!";
// AFTER
let text = response.settings?.headerText ?? "Hello, world!";
CSS Scroll Snap is coming to Firefox
Šime Vidas: CSS Scroll Snap is supported in Chrome, Safari, and the next version of Firefox. Scroll snapping works well on touch screen devices but there are some usability issues on desktop platforms.
Last week I read about the web turning into a dark forest. This made me think, and I’m convinced that there’s hope in the dark forest. Let’s stay positive about how we can contribute to making the web a better place and stick to the principle that each one of us is able to make an impact with small actions. Whether it’s you adding Webmentions, removing tracking scripts from a website, recycling plastic, picking up trash from the street to throw it into a bin, or cycling instead of driving to work for a week, we all can make things better for ourselves and the people around us. We just have to do it.
Chrome 75 brings support for the Web Share API which is already implemented in Safari. Latency on canvas contexts has also been improved.
The Safari Technology Preview Release 84 introduced Safari 13 features: warnings for weak passwords, dark mode support for iOS, support for aborting Fetch requests, FIDO2-compliant USB security keys with the Web Authentication standard, support for “Sign In with Apple” (for Safari and WKWebView). The Visual Viewport API, ApplePay in WKWebView, screen sharing via WebRTC, and an API for loading ES6 modules are also supported from now on.
There’s an important update to Apple’s AppStore review guidelines that requires developers to offer “Sign In with Apple” in their apps in case they support third-party sign-in once the service is available to the public later this year.
Firefox 67 is out now with the Dark Mode CSS media query, WebRender, and side-by-side profiles that allow you to run multiple instances parallelly. Furthermore, enhanced privacy controls are built in against crypto miners and fingerprinting, as well as support for AV1 on Windows, Linux, and macOS for videos, String.prototype.matchAll(), and dynamic imports.
General
The web relies on so many open-source projects, and, yet, here’s what it looks like to live off an open-source budget. Most authors are below the poverty line, forced to live in cheaper countries or not able to make a living at all from their public service of providing reliable, open software for others who then use it commercially.
We all know that annoying client who ignores your knowledge and gets creative on their own. As a developer, Holger Bartel experienced it dozens of times; now he found himself in the same position, having ordered a fine drink and then messed it up.
UI/UX
With so many dark patterns built into the software and websites we use daily, Fabricio Teixeira and Caio Braga call for a tech diet for users.
“Dark patterns try to manipulate users to engage further, deeper, or longer on a site or app. The world needs a tech diet, and designers can help make it a reality. (Image credit)
CSS
The CSS feature for truncating multi-line text has been implemented in Firefox. -webkit-line-clamp: 3;, for example, will truncate text at the end of line three.
Kevin Litman-Navarro analyzed over 150 privacy policies and shares his findings in a visual story. Not only does it take about 15 minutes on average to read a privacy policy, but most of them require a college degree or even professional career to understand them.
Our view on privacy hasn’t changed much since the 18th century, but the circumstances are different today: Companies have a wild appetite to store more and more data about more people in a central place — data that was once exclusively accessible by state authorities. We should redefine what privacy, personal data, and consent are, as Maciej Ceg?owski argues in “The new wilderness.”
The people at WebKit are very active when it comes to developing clever solutions to protect users without compromising too much on usability and keeping the interests of publishers and vendors in mind at the same time. Now they introduced “privacy preserving ad click attribution for the web,” a technique that limits the data which is sent to third parties while still providing useful attribution metrics to advertisers.
Most privacy policies on the web are harder to read than Stephen Hawking’s “A Brief History Of Time,” as Kevin Litman-Navarro found out by examining 150 privacy policies. (Image credit)
Accessibility
Brad Frost describes a great way to reduce motion on websites (of animated GIFs, for example), using the picture element and its media query feature.
Tooling
The IP Geolocation API is an open-source real-time IP to Geolocation JSON API with detailed countries data integration that is based on the Maxmind Geolite2 database.
As a society, we’re overworked, have too many belongings, yet crave for more, and companies only exist to grow indefinitely. This is how we kick-started climate change in the past century and this is how we got more people than ever into burn-outs, depressions, and various other health issues, including work-related suicides. Philipp Frey has a bold theory that breaks with our current system: A research by Nässén and Larsson suggests that a 1% decrease in working hours could lead to a 0.8% decrease in GHG emissions. Taking it further, the paper suggests that working 12 hours a week would allow us to easily achieve climate goals, if we’re also changing the economy to not entirely focus on growth anymore. An interesting study as it explores new ways of working, living, and consuming.
Leo Babauta shares a method that helps you acknowledge when you’re tired. It’s hard to accept, but we are humans and not machines, so there are times when we feel tired and our batteries are low. The best way to recover is realizing that this is happening and focusing on it to regain some energy.
Many of us are trying to achieve some minutes or hours of “deep work” a day. Fadeke Adegbuyi’s “The Complete Guide to Deep Work” shares valuable tips to master it.
Going Beyond…
People who live a “zero waste” life are often seen as extreme, but this is only one point of view. Here’s the other side where one of the “extreme” persons reminds us that it used to be normal to go to a farmer’s market to buy things that aren’t packed in plastic, to ride a bike, and drink water from a public fountain. Instead, our consumerism has become quite extreme and needs to change if we want to survive and stay healthy.
Sweden wants to become climate neutral by 2045, and now they presented an interesting visualization of the plan. It’s designed to help policymakers identify and fill in gaps to ensure that the goal will be achieved. The visualization is open to the public, so anyone can hold the government accountable.
Pop quiz: which of the following statements is sarcastic?
Edge is actually a kind of decent browser, just missing some features.
Writing CSS using JavaScript is a viable and sensible way to get things done, now that we use JS for everything else. We might as well.
Brutalism as a movement has, in some ways, made some of us into better designers.
It can be hard to tell, can’t it? For the record, it’s number 2. But really, you might have seen people say each one of those things somewhere on the Internet, and some of them even meant that second one. And then, some of them said it and didn’t mean it, but other people thought they meant it and got mad at them. Even in real life, I’ve occasionally said something out loud that I thought had a clearly sarcastic tone, only to have to clarify my statement afterward.
As web designers (who are often tasked with also making website content), you may run into a situation where sarcasm is called for, and you have to make sure people don’t get it wrong. That’s a tough call. We live in a world where it can be darned difficult to tell sarcastic opinions from trolling.
We live in a world where people aren’t always ready to see sarcasm, or even humor for what it is. You sometimes have to prime your audience to expect something funny, rather than something glaringly stupid or offensive. This is why comedians have “hype men”, or other opening acts to warm up an audience. This is why sarcasm on Twitter often goes very, very wrong.
So how do you convey this to your users? How do you tell them that sarcasm’s coming? Well, there are a few simple ways:
Don’t Tell Them
This approach depends on the apparent absurdity of your statement to make the joke work. Now, I already listed a few reasons above as to why you wouldn’t want to use this approach. Well, the fact is that it can actually work, but only under very specific circumstances.
Using sarcasm with no warning works only when you know your audience very well, and they are all on the same page already. For example, if you tell a sarcastic joke about plumbing to an audience of all plumbers who share the same baseline of knowledge, you can be reasonably sure they’ll all get it. Throw a few lawyers into the audience, and this approach fails.
Tell Them in the Most Literal Way
One of the safest ways of communicating sarcasm that I’ve found is with formatting. Yes, formatting. I’ll literally put my sarcasm in bracket-tags like this:
[sarcasm]XML has no practical application outside of MS Office.[/sarcasm]
It has the advantage of being simple, obvious, and very difficult to dispute. On the downside, it’s not very subtle. However, on the Internet, it’s usually not worth being subtle.
Less Literal Formatting
Okay, so you want to convey a sarcastic or ironic statement without tags. Fine. There are a couple of tricks that started with the print industry, and still sort of work online today. The first and most popular one is quotation marks. Quotation marks are best used to indicate a sarcastic tone for short phrases, or even single words, and are the basis for the every popular “air quotes” gesture people use in real life.
For full sentences or paragraphs, you can use italics. It’s especially useful if you’re actually quoting someone, like so: “Oh sure,” said Bob, “just go ahead tweet sarcastic things at people with no contextualization. That’ll work out well.”
Use Memes
Some memes are an almost inherently sarcastic form of communication. When people see a known sarcastic meme coming, they know what to expect. Mind you, this only works if your audience knows the meme in question, to it’s a situational tool at best.
Illustration
Illustrations (such as comics, for example) are a good way to visually set the tone for things you want to say. Show someone some comic strip art, and their brain will probably be primed for some humor and sarcasm. At least in the west, sarcastic comics are incredibly common, and form the basis of a collective experience of irony. They’re generally hard to misinterpret.
Use Audio or Video
Sarcasm is far easier to convey when people can actually hear you use a dramatic, facetious tone of voice. It’s not a 100% guaranteed solution, but it’s a lot more likely to convey your tone correctly if you keep the sarcasm relegated to your multimedia content.
(Just don’t be like me. Most of my sarcasm comes out with a very deadpan voice and blank facial expression. It’s a bad habit and it confuses people.)
Sarcasm in Microcopy
Microcopy isn’t specifically a medium for sarcasm or jokes, but it’s been used that way a lot. Designers often insert humor into microcopy as a way to “humanize” a user experience with any given product. Just once, though, I want to see a sales form with text that says “Wooo! Money! We like money!” buried somewhere in it. As of yet, I haven’t seen anyone who has the sheer cheek to pull off something like that.
Like everything else on this list, of course, you’ll have to watch out for context. If microcopy on your site is typically used for providing plain, helpful instructions, suddenly including an ironic statement might throw people off. If your microcopy is going to be sarcastic, it has to be sarcastic from the very beginning.
The story of Zoom founder Eric S. Yuan is an entrepreneurial fable that proves even the most crowded markets are never truly full.
Before launching his online conferencing and collaboration product, Zoom’s Yuan ran engineering for Cisco’s WebEx. He expanded the WebEx team from 10 engineers to 800 and grew revenues from $0 to over $800 million annually.
Yuan was the heart of WebEx from 1997 to 2011, but he wasn’t happy. The product wasn’t good enough. Yuan (and many customers) thought it was slow, multimedia streams were often shaky, and it lacked modern features for mobile.
For years, Yuan campaigned Cisco execs to let him rework WebEx and build video conferencing on the cloud, but the existing product was still earning serious cash.
His bosses saw no reason to risk a reboot. So, Yuan left in 2011 to build Zoom.
“Cisco made a mistake,” he recently told Forbes magazine. “Three years after I left, they realized what I said was right.”
Was he ever.
Zoom’s annual revenues currently hover around $331 million.
The product has over 50,000 corporate customers, including Uber, Walmart, Slack, Ticketmaster, and Nasdaq, plus countless individuals and small businesses.
And Zoom stock rose nearly 30% in the month after its mid-April IPO.
Yuan knew his new product would go head-to-head with Google (Hangouts), Microsoft (Skype), and Cisco, of course, but he was unfazed. He knew that innovation and excellence can knock out even the biggest competitors.
I’m consistently inspired by Yuan’s story.
I launched JotForm in 2006, based on the idea that everyone should be able to create simple forms that boost their productivity.
Just like Yuan, I thought there was a better way to work. And as we built a product that now serves 4.9 million people, some serious competition began to emerge.
In 2008, even Google stepped into the ring. Many of my friends and colleagues said we were done. After all, who could compete against Silicon Valley’s ultimate Goliath?
Honestly, I was devastated. I had quit my stable job to pursue this idea, and I wasn’t sure what I would do next.
But we kept plugging away, and a strange thing happened. We continued to grow. We kept innovating and improving the product, and our customers stuck with us. They even helped us to get better.
We stayed focused on one thing?—?forms?—?while many of competitors chased each new shiny object that popped up on the horizon.
Eventually, I learned an important lesson:
You don’t have to kill yourself trying to invent the next Facebook. You don’t have to disrupt an industry to succeed. You can still create significant value in categories most write off as finished.
I’ve learned that finding yourself in a well-defined market where tech giants step into the ring isn’t an excuse to quit the battle?—?I’m glad we never gave up.
Focusing on the customer, not the competition, brought us 1 million new users last year alone and we continue to grow +50K users every month?—?all without a single dime in outside funding. We are 100% bootstrapped.
Here are my key learnings from growing JotForm next to Google and other competitors who announce one investment round after another:
1. Technology doesn’t care if you’re comfortable
Every time a new technology moves beyond the fringes, you have an opportunity to improve your product?—?and if you don’t leverage the moment, someone else will.
Think about how Kodak failed to embrace digital photography (and filed for bankruptcy in 2012), or how Xerox remained fixated on copy machines, even as digital files were becoming commonplace. By the time these companies tried to play along, it was too late to catch up. Making something great is just the start. You have to keep making it better if you want to stay relevant.
A product company that doesn’t continually reinvent itself will kill the product.
At JotForm, we’re constantly probing into our weaknesses and reinventing our product. We don’t switch lanes, but we do believe in stretching ourselves as much as possible.
Innovation is essential for success?—?technology really doesn’t care if you’re comfortable.
2. New products have low visibility
Creating a new product is like driving at night. You can only see as far as your headlights.
But once more users come on board and the product begins to grow, the horizon opens up. You begin to discover what’s missing and you can reroute as necessary.
In a few days, we’ll release our new mobile app. We started working on it more than a year ago, after a user mentioned that she needed to fill in forms offline, then sync the data when she returned to the office.
Aswe started building and testing the app, we realized that we were missing some key form fields. We added functions that allow users to take a photo, draw on an image, use geolocation, record a voice, and scan QR and barcodes. We also added a kiosk mode that locks down all device functions other than the form, gave users the ability to assign and share forms, and more.
Users and customers will tell you what they want, what they like, and what they don’t want, but it takes time to implement this feedback.
Pushing for innovation gives you the lead time you need to stay ahead of the curve.
3. Complacency kills momentum
A team that keeps moving will not only achieve its goals, it will also discover fresh opportunities.
If your product is static and you’re simply fixing bugs as they pop up, you can’t imagine what’s possible. You’re not exploring. You’re not stretching the limits.
In 1983, James Dyson created the first bagless vacuum cleaner. The invention was a game-changer, so Dyson could have sat back, counted his money, and gradually updated the external parts to match color and design trends.
But he built a multi-billion-dollar company that has innovation in its DNA. Today, Dyson makes everything from hair dryers to lighting, and the organization is constantly setting new environmental and social targets.
4. Building a product also means building a team
A team that doesn’t reinvent its products can’t lead an industry. Employees won’t understand what’s happening across your market, and they won’t be challenged or engaged. Eventually, good people will leave your organization.
The best product teams are hungry to solve problems. It’s the fuel that drives their work and stirs their creativity.
Yet, even the biggest companies don’t have unlimited resources. That’s why it’s essential to keep your star players focused on just a few key products?—?and ideally, just one.
At JotForm, we can compete with big dogs like Google because we have a singular focus. All 140 of our employees are dedicated to one thing, while Google Forms is just a tiny drop in a massive corporate ocean.
How to bake innovation into your organization
Innovation demands intention. It’s so easy to get caught up in the day-to-day cycles of growing a business and keeping even a strong product running.
In many ways, I can see how the WebEx leaders were afraid to rock the boat. Hesitating to mess with a good thing is simply human nature.
Change, however, is inevitable. It’s essential to keep moving forward, or you’ll struggle to catch up.
Here are four ways to ensure you’re building a culture of innovation.
1. Establish long-term strategies
A strategy is a lighthouse that guides your decisions and priorities. Every year, I set a new strategy for the company. Sure, we still handle the day-to-day tasks of supporting customers and making small product improvements, but we also focus on a specific challenge. For example, in 2017 we reinvented our form builder. In 2018, we reinvented the forms themselves. And in 2019, we’re reinventing mobile forms with our new app.
2. Assign open-ended projects
While strategies offer guidance, they can also feel overwhelming. That’s where it helps to begin with a question. For example, we asked our teams, “how can we create a better mobile product?” That’s it.
We knew that it would work offline and include some existing desktop features, but that’s where the constraints ended.
As our teams tackled this one question, they gathered customer feedback, conducted user interviews, and most importantly, kept their minds open.
Tackling a major strategy means learning?—?and admitting when you’re lost. That’s when it helps to look at other markets and parallel industries. Examine unfamiliar products. Eventually, you’ll find your way again.
3. Don’t set deadlines
Our cultural obsession with productivity often creates unnecessary panic and stress. We worry that if we don’t set a release date, nothing will happen. In my experience, however, that’s just not true.
Once we assign product teams to tackle a big, open-ended project, we still have check-ins.
Our weekly Demo Days are a chance to see work-in-progress features and gather feedback from other teams. These sessions maintain our momentum. Yet, the teams still have time to go deep and innovate. They even have time to get bored, which is when the brain really starts to generate new possibilities.
We ensure the product has time to evolve without rushing it. Only when it looks beautiful, tests well, and operates seamlessly do we set a release date.
4. Provide real freedom
Innovation means allowing people to hack their way through the forest. Ultimately, you have to be in there, building and struggling, in order to make valuable discoveries.
And while objectives and optimizations have their place, no one creates the first iPhone or a bagless vacuum or a better conferencing product by nudging the needle just a little.
Freedom also nurtures creativity, so trust your teams. Give them the space, the tools, and the responsibility to collaborate and think provocatively.
Remember that success comes from constant, relentless innovation?—?even in a well-defined market.
Greek mythology tells the story of Zeus creating the cloud nymph, Nephele. Like other Greek myths, this tale gets pretty bizarre and X-rated. Here’s a very abridged, polite version.
Nephele, we are told, was created by Zeus in the image of his own beautiful wife. A mortal meets Nephele, falls in love with her and, together, they take an adult nap™. Finally, in a strange twist, the cloud gives birth to half-human half-horse Centaur babies.
Weird, right??Personally, I can’t make heads or tails of it. Thankfully, the process for creating clouds in the browser is much more straightforward and far less risqué.
Recently, I discovered that developer Yuan Chuan has realized code-generated, photorealistic clouds. For me, this notion in the browser had long been the stuff of myth.
With one glance at the code in this pen we can imagine that convincing individual clouds are achievable through the use of CSS box-shadow with a element containing two SVG filters as its complement.
The photorealism we want is achieved with a delicate mix of feTurbulence and feDisplacementMap. These SVG filters are powerful, complex and offer very exciting features (including an Oscar winning algorithm)! However, under the hood, their complexity can be a bit intimidating.
For this article, we will focus on learning to use these SVG filters to get spectacular results. We don’t need to delve too deeply into what is happening behind the scenes algorithmically, much in the way an artist isn’t required know the molecular structure of paint to render a stunning landscape.
Instead, let’s pay close attention to small handful of SVG attributes that are essential for drawing convincing clouds in the browser. Their use will enable us to bend these powerful filters to our will and learn how to customize them with precision in our own projects.
Let’s start with some basics
The CSS box-shadow property has five values that deserve close attention:
In the same way that a hand changes shape to alter the shadow, a “source shape” in the our HTML can move and morph to move and alter the shape of a shadow rendered in the browser. box-shadow duplicates the “morphing” features on the original size and border-radius. SVG filters get applied to both the element and its shadow.
This is the markup for our SVG so far. It won’t render because we haven’t defined anything visual (not to mention the zero width and height). It’s sole purpose is to hold a filter that we feed our SourceGraphic (aka our
). Our source
and its shadow are both being distorted independently by the filter.
We’ll add the essential CSS rule linking the HTML element (`#cloud-circle`) to the SVG filter using its ID:
No worries! We have only just scratched the surface and have a lot more good stuff to look at.
Experimenting with the feDisplacementMap scale attribute
A few un-scientific experiments with this one attribute can yield dramatic results. For the moment, let’s keep the all values in feTurbulence constant and simply adjust the scale attribute of DisplacementMap.
As scale increases (by increments of 30) our source
becomes distorted and casts a shadow to mirror the stochastic form in which clouds appear in the sky.
Great, now the source element is getting in the way. ?
Wait! We’ve widened the source element and now it’s in the way of our of the white shadow we’re calling a cloud. Let’s “re-cast” the shadow at a greater distance so that our cloud is no longer obscured by the source image. (Think of this as moving your hand away further from the wall so it doesn’t block the view of your shadow puppet.)
This is nicely achieved with a bit of CSS positioning. The is the parent element for our cloud, which is statically positioned by default. Let’s “tuck” our source
up and out of the way with some absolute positioning. Initially, that will reposition our shadow as well, so we’ll also need to increase the distance of the shadow from the element and nudge the element a bit more.
#cloud-circle {
width: 500px;
height: 275px;
background: #000;
border-radius: 50%;
filter: url(#filter);
box-shadow: 400px 400px 60px 0px #fff; /* Increase shadow offset */
position: absolute; /* Take the parent out of the document flow */
top: -320px; /* Move a little down */
left: -320px; /* Move a little right */
}
What is painted to the browser is a pretty decent depiction of a cloud–But, I’m not sure…does this cloud really do justice the cloud nymph, Nephele? I’m sure we can do better!
From the look of the depth, texture and richness of the clouds in this photograph, one thing is clear: Zeus went to art school. At the very least, he must have read the The Universal Principles of Design which illustrates a powerful–yet, deceptively ordinary–concept:
[…] lighting bias plays a significant role in the interpretation of depth and naturalness, and can be manipulated in a variety of ways by designers…Use the level of contrast between light and dark areas to vary the appearance of depth.
This passage provides for us a hint as to how to we can vastly improve our own code-generated cloud. We can render our cloud with a good deal of fidelity to the clouds in our reference image by stacking layers of differing form, size and color on top of each other. All that takes is calling our filter as many times as we want layers.
Applying our layers will afford us an opportunity to explore feTurbulence and realize its versatility. We’ll choose the smoother type available to us: fractalNoise with numOctaves cranked up to 6.
What does all that mean? For now, let’s focus specifically on the baseFrequency attribute. Here’s what we get as we increase the value of n:
The lower the value, the rounder and fuzzier we get. The higher the value, the rounder and more rigid we get.
Words like turbulence, noise, frequency, and octave may seem odd and even confusing. But fear not! It’s actually perfectly accurate to analogize this filter’s effects to sound waves. We may equate a low frequency (baseFrequency=0.001) with a low, muffled noise and a rising frequency (baseFrequency=0.1) with a higher, crisper pitch.
We can see that our sweet spot for a cumulus-like effect may lie comfortably around the ~0.005 and ~0.01 range for the baseFrequency.
Adding detail with numOctaves
Incrementing numOctaves allows us to render our image in extremely granular detail. This requires a great deal of calculation, so be warned: high values are a significant performance hit. Try to resist the temptation to pump up this value unless your browser is wearing a helmet and knee-pads.
The higher the value we put into numOctaves the more granular detail give to our cloud.
The good news is that we don’t have to crank this value too high in order to produce detail and delicacy. As the array of images above shows, we can satisfy ourselves with a numOctavesvalue of 4 or 5.
There is much to say about the seed attribute as it offers a hint into the magic happening behind the scenes. But, for our purposes, the utility of seed can be reduced to four words: “different value, different shape.”
The Perlin Noise function (mentioned earlier) uses this value as the starting point for its random number generator. Choosing not to include this attribute will default seed to zero. When included, however, whatever value we give seed, we don’t need to worry about a performance hit.
Different seed values produce different shapes.
The GIF above represents some of what seed has to offer. Keep in mind that each of those clouds is a layered, composite cloud. (While I have tweaked attributes for each layer, I have kept their respective seed values uniform.)
Here, with a close look at the reference image, I’ve layered 3 cloud-
s (of differing in opacity) onto a single base div. Through trial and error and punching in arbitrary seed values, I eventually arrived at a shape resembling the shape of the cloud in the photograph.
s that we paint to the browser could be superior to Zeus’s, Nephele.
However, the more mystery we are able to tease out of CSS and SVG filters, the more we are empowered create something visually stunning with a high degree of fidelity to the Thunder God’s original creation. We can, then, can go on experiment further!
I hope this gets you excited about creating a bit of photorealism on the web. I developed a little tool to help put them all to use and experiment a bit. Any questions, suggestions or advice? Ping me in the twitterverse drop a comment here.
