Today we added a custom Google search engine to FormAssembly’s help and support documentation. The search engine automatically searches all of FormAssembly’s online documentation, including the help section, FAQs, customer forum, and the UserVoice feedback forum.

While our goal is to create an application that is easy enough to use that you won’t need the help section, sometimes the fastest way to accomplish your goals is to check out the documentation. The search will enable you to take advantage not only of the documentation we’ve written, but also the collective knowledge in the customer forum and on UserVoice. As always, if you can’t find the answers you need, we’re available by email if you submit a support request.

We welcome any feedback you have on search or FormAssembly in general. Feel free to leave comments!

In order to keep you updated on Form Assembly and make sure you get the most out of the service, we’ve added some new ways for you to stay connected.

New Notification Option

We’ve added a third notification option in “My Account” Preferences. You can now choose to receive notifications of problems with FormAssembly (such as any downtime) and any processing problems with your forms. This may be especially useful for Salesforce users, as it will notify you when your Salesforce password expires. The notification will allow you to immediately reset your password and resume processing of your forms.

This notification option is off by default, but you can turn it on at any time by going to the “My Account” tab and selecting the Preferences tab.

Salesforce Connector Log Update

We’ve also updated the Salesforce Connector log to give you additional information about responses that fail for any reason. You can now click the “View Response” next to a failed response and, if needed, edit it. Once the source of the error has been addressed, simply click the “Resend” button to send the response to Salesforce.

We hope you’ll find this new feature helpful and that it will improve your experience with Form Assembly.

Based on feedback from the user experience survey we blogged about last week and the UserVoice forum, we’re rolling out a new version of the Form Builder.

Usability and Appearance Updates

You’ll probably notice that we’ve updated the look of the application and added a new button on the toolbar: “New Page.” The multi-page functionality has always been there, but we made it easier to use. This will enable you to quickly add new pages to your form.

The Outline and Properties tabs have been fine-tuned to be easier to use in a number of small but important ways. In addition, if you would like to keep the preview visible when editing your form, you can now check the “show only one tab at a time” box.

Default Selection for Multiple Choice Questions

One oft-requested feature that we’ve implemented is the ability to define a default choice in a multiple choice list. You’ll now see a checkbox or radio button–depending on the type of multiple choice list you’re making–that allows you to denote one or more selections as the default.

Custom Predefined Elements

If you have sections that you want use on multiple forms, you may find the ability to create and save your own predefined elements helpful. To do this, simply create the section you use frequently and in the “predefined element…” dropdown list, select “Create new from selection.” You can delete and edit custom sections by selecting “Manage predefined elements” from the same dropdown. The new predefined element will then be available for use in other forms.

Custom Validation and Error Messages

Many of you asked about adding the ability to change the error messages that appear when a respondent does not enter an answer into a required field or enters an answer in the wrong format. You can now use regular expressions to define the correct format for a free-text response and the message you would like your respondent to see. To learn about regular expressions, click here.

Thanks for all your input via the survey and the UserVoice forum. We’ve got more updates in the pipeline, so check back in the next few weeks.

If you signed up to receive emails about providing feedback to FormAssembly, you should have seen an email about our first Customer Experience Survey about a week and a half ago.

We really appreciate the time many of you took to complete the survey. Your comments will guide important upcoming improvements to the application. We were excited to see how many of our users provided constructive criticism so we can make FormAssembly a better product for your needs.

If you haven’t taken the survey but have something to say, click here to fill it out now. We’ll continue taking responses for the next week.

Keep your eyes open for future surveys, as we’re hoping to get your opinions periodically. In the meantime, don’t forget that you can always submit feature requests via the UserVoice forum.

We have a small update for our Salesforce customers. If you are using FormAssembly for AppExchange, you may now upgrade to the latest release.

What’s new:

This update ensures that access to your FormAssembly data is done over an encrypted connection (SSL) only. This eliminates an annoying warning for Internet Explorer users about the presence of mixed secure/unsecure content on the page.

How to Upgrade:

If you are the Salesforce administrator for your organization, go to our AppExchange listing, click the ‘Get It Now’ button and follow the instructions.  You do not need to uninstall FormAssembly for AppExchange first, your package will simply be updated.  No data will be modified or deleted.

If you have any question or suggestion regarding this update, please leave a comment below, or email us.

We’ve just posted three new tutorials to help you get acquainted with and use the Form Builder more effectively.

The Introduction tutorial is a basic overview of the Form Builder. This will be helpful if you are new to the Form Builder or need a refresher course. This tutorial covers the basic elements of the Form Builder (toolbar, preview pane, Outline, Properties panel and Advanced panel).

The Grid Layout tutorial describes how to effectively use the grid (table) layout in your forms. Grid layouts are especially helpful when you need to collect multiple pieces of related information. Questions are displayed in a single row. The tutorial also demonstrates how to create a repeatable section or question.

The Conditional and Calculated Questions shows how to create a question that only appears when users select a specific answer to a preceding question. Conditional questions can keep your form from being needlessly long and confusing by hiding questions that are irrelevant to certain respondents. This tutorial also shows how to create questions that calculate a numeric total; for instance, that calculate the cost of club membership.

We hope you find these tutorials helpful and that they make your experience at FormAssembly.com more enjoyable.  We would love to hear your feedback on these tutorials and any ideas you have about tutorials you’d like to see in the future.

UPDATE (7/16): The issue is now resolved. Forms are no longer affected by the incorrect report.

Our service is currently impacted by an incorrect report to Google’s web-forgery (a.k.a phishing) list.  Visitors trying to access a form hosted on FormAssembly.com using Firefox 3.0 or above may in some cases run into a ‘web-forgery’ warning message and be blocked from seeing and filling out the form.

Who is affected:

Your form is not affected by this issue if you are hosting the form on your own site, or if you linked  to it using the public address as it is presented in the ‘Publish’ tab under your account (it looks like this: http://app.formassembly.com/forms/view/1 with the last number being different for each form). This should be the case for the vast majority of our users.

Your form is affected only if you somehow obtained the alternative format for the public address and used it in your link. It looks like this: http://app.formassembly.com/index.php?url=/forms/view/1. These types of addresses are currently blocked for visitors using Firefox 3.0 or above.

What you can do if you are affected:

If possible, change the link that points to your form to use the normal public address, as displayed in the ‘publish’ tab under your account. If you can’t change this link, we expect the issue to be fully resolved within a couple days.

What we did to remediate this issue:

We asked Google to remove our site from the list. We are not sure what is Google’s turnaround on this. We are assuming a day or two and hopefully this will all be settled soon.

Why did this happen:

Malicious users sometimes try to abuse our service by creating ‘phishing’ web forms (a.k.a web forgery). We take those forms down as they are reported to us or as they are caught in our automated filters, but it looks like this time the abuse was reported directly to Google’s ‘web forgery’ list.

Unfortunately, Google did not choose to just block the incriminated form. They indiscriminately blocked all our forms, which of course is now affecting legitimate users with legitimate forms.  We are lucky that only a small number of forms end up being affected, but we are quite upset at the manner this list is managed. We did not receive any advance warning from Google nor Mozilla, and we can only hope that they are as prompt to remove sites from the list as they are to add them to it.

In order to make your web forms look as good as possible right out of the box, we made a small change to the layout of forms hosted by FormAssembly.com.

Forms are now centered and their width has been reduced. Here’s a demonstration form using this new layout (it used to look like this).

To minimize any adverse effect to the layout of existing forms, this change only applies to forms created or modified since March 16th. This change also does not affect forms that are hosted on your site, unless the form is displayed through an inline frame.

If your form picked up the new layout but you need to keep the old one, please follow the instructions here. The code snippet you’ll need is the one named ‘Removing the default background on forms hosted directly on FormAssembly.com’.

Do you have any suggestion on how we could keep improving the look & feel of your form? We’d love to hear from you. Please post your ideas here, or on our UserVoice forum.

Thank you.

I remember first stumbling on Luke Wroblewski’s writing a couple years ago during the early stages of FormAssembly. His insights on web forms design has been extremely valuable to us. I’m happy we can (modestly) return the favor by promoting his latest book, published earlier this year.

“In Web Form Design, Luke Wroblewski draws on original research, his considerable experience at Yahoo! and eBay, and the perspectives of many of the field’s leading designers to show you everything you need to know about designing effective and engaging Web forms. ” – (excerpt from rosenfeldmedia.com)

To order a copy of “Web Form Design: Filling in the Blanks”  and get 10% off, go to: http://rosenfeldmedia.com (Promo code FORMASSEMBLY).

Web Forms: Filling in the Blanks

Luke Wroblewski’s book will provide everything you wanted to know and more about designing effective and engaging Web forms that optimize these key customer interactions. Rosenfeld Media, 2008. Read More >

BTW, nice cover by Jason Kernevich.

One of most common questions we receive these days is “how can I download the form’s HTML code?”. This option has always been available, but it was somewhat buried behind a link in the ‘display & processing’ tab.

We decided to address this usability issue by providing a new tab called ‘Publish’. This tab contains all the information needed to start using your web form and this is the first thing you’ll see when you leave the Form Builder. The ‘Display & Processing’ tab has been renamed ‘Display Options’ and, without the publishing information, is now shorter.

We hope you’ll find this change helpful. Please feel free to comment on any usability issue you’ve encountered on FormAssembly.com.