Ask HN: What do you expect from a form builder?

by ugur2nd on 9/15/2024, 1:16:11 PM with 6 comments
I'm coding a form builder from scratch. I want it to be different from the others.

I wonder what kind of expectations are you in? What kind of features do you think should be in a form builder?

I am open to many ideas because I am under construction.

  • by codingdave on 9/15/2024, 1:34:03 PM

    What audience do you plan to focus on? Because I doubt HN is your target market - many of us could whip up our own form builder when needed. So to know what features will differentiate your product, you need to know what differentiators exist between your intended audience vs. everyone else. What do they need that is not already served by the multitude of existing form builders?

  • by japagley on 9/17/2024, 1:34:21 PM

    One of the best things you can do before building a new product is to start with the problem, not the product.

    If you plan to build another form builder, what problem will you solve that the others do not? You should know the answer to this question before writing a single code line.

    We did exactly this at Joyfill (http://joyfill.io/developers an embeddable form builder SDK for developers) — a problem was brought to us hundreds of times before we even considered building another form builder.

  • by bqc on 9/15/2024, 1:25:24 PM

    The form components like input, select, etc should be directly drag-gable with responsiveness in it.

    On the side panel, there should be config option for each form input, like placeholder, validation, etc

  • by solardev on 9/15/2024, 8:23:59 PM

    - Managed everything, not just the form builder WYSIWYG, but also the hosted form itself, confirmation emails, reports browser, etc. Like Google Forms / SurveyMonkey / Alchemer.

    - Easy integration with JS frameworks and styling. If you're targeting devs, I'd love to be able to import your package on npm and have a basic form ready to go, but each component should be customizable and styleable (like https://mui.com/material-ui/react-text-field/)

    - Basically, I'd love to be able to use a WYSIWYG to compose the form, define validations, etc., but then be able to take that drop it into my existing React/Vue/Svelte frontend, and style it and modify components as necessary. But once they click "submit", then it sends it directly to your API with AJAX, the user gets a confirmation (both on-screen and via email), and then later on I can go to a hosted forms dashboard to see all the submissions, export them to a spreadsheet, ideally run some basic analytics on them, etc.