Form Health helps individuals reach their health goals through a medical weight loss plan. It pairs individuals with a board-certified doctor and Registered Dietitian to create a personalized plan combining FDA-approved medications, sustainable nutrition, physical activity, and behavior change support.

In order to build these personalized plans, Form Health needs to collect sensitive information from prospects in a trustworthy and HIPAA-compliant way. To do this, in 2021 Form Health’s VP of Engineering started using Formsort to power its “Am I a candidate?” eligibility quiz. 

Over a year later, Form Health runs 10+ critical onboarding and post-onboarding forms on Formsort: onboarding, check-in surveys, contact forms, provider referrals, and more.

By building on Formsort, Form Health has saved thousands of engineering hours, translating into hundreds of thousands of dollars saved. Moreover, their engineering team has empowered their product and marketing teams to build, ship and test their own experiments.

Client challenges: Form changes on their existing stack had long lead times, and more basic form builders lacked the customization and integrations the team needed

When Jeremy Weiskotten joined Form Health as VP of Engineering, the team was using Wordpress for their website and sign-up flow. Every time the team wanted to make a small change to the sign-up flow, they needed to submit a ticket and get it prioritized. This led to long lead times: one month to get prioritization, and another month to make the change.

Jeremy decided to explore other options. Like many engineers, he didn’t want to own this form and didn’t want to be a bottleneck for PMs and marketers’ growth experiments. Jeremy evaluated more basic form builders but struggled to find a tool that was fully customizable, HIPAA-compliant, and had the integrations he needed.

Formsort solutions: Highly customizable forms, flexible deployment, and support for multiple form use cases

The eligibility form is the first point of contact between Form Health and its prospects, so it needs to be aligned to the company’s design system. Formsort’s team was very hands-on in the early stages and built Form Health a proof-of-concept (POC) according to their styling and logic needs. The POC included a fully customizable layout - with backgrounds and button styles tailored to Form Health’s brand - and complex calculations such as state eligibility and BMI. 

Once Jeremy saw the key capabilities, he knew Formsort would help Form Health’s team achieve greater control over UX without depending on in-house engineering.

Form deployment on web and native mobile app

Form Health has a web and mobile app, so it was important to find a form software that worked across different devices. Formsort’s flexible deployment options allowed Form Health to embed their eligibility form inside their webpage. Formsort’s redirect feature allowed Form Health to seamlessly integrate their forms into their native mobile app.

Form Health needed a way to quickly test and iterate on multiple versions of a form to evaluate conversion optimization. All of this was done on Formsort. Once the team designed their first flow variant, they were able to save it as a theme and make iterative changes for future versions. After they developed several variants, they were able to split traffic across them and compare conversion. 

If they needed additional analytics, they set up a native integration with their marketing analytics tool of choice (Optimizely, Amplitude, Google Tag Manager, etc.).

Form Health has built and shipped over 30 form variants on Formsort, and Formsort’s team has supported them at every step. According to Jeremy there’s been “great support from the C-suite all the way down to customer success and support engineering”.

Formsort initially solved a pain point for engineering. Now it helps Form Health’s PMs quickly design and launch growth experiments. In one instance, Formsort helped the Form Health team build a form in a few days, while the internal build would have taken one month. 

Faster testing timelines are due to Formsort’s theme feature, in-house analytics and integrations. “The analytics we get [are] pretty much out of the box through the native integrations. We integrate with tools like Amplitude and our own data warehouse, so we can spot issues in our funnel sooner.”

By removing engineers from the critical path, Jeremy’s team saved countless hours of form building time, translating into hundreds of thousands of dollars saved. Instead of attending to form change tickets, the engineering team has been able to redirect their energy to net new feature development, allowing his team to focus on their unique problems.

Scalably building 10+ forms across the user journey

As Form Health was rapidly expanding, they were running into some issues with their CRM workflow and needed a way to seamlessly collect customers’ PHI data after the onboarding phase. They were previously using several tools to handle these follow-up data collection steps, leading to a disjointed process. 

Formsort’s “theme” feature allowed Form Health to quickly spin up new forms for these use cases in their design system. Form Health has expanded from its initial form use case - eligibility and onboarding - to 10+ flows across the user journey. Form Health now uses Formsort to run its check-in surveys and consolidate a significant amount of its PHI data collection: contact form, cancelation form, and most recently provider referrals. With Formsort, they can seamlessly collect this information in one tool.

VP of Engineering

We use Formsort because we can ship changes so much faster, often without engineering effort. Empowering others to make changes and try new ideas faster makes our team and product better. It's a huge advantage.

Learn how Form Health generated hundreds of thousands of dollars of engineering cost savings by building its most important patient flows on Formsort

How Form Health saved thousands of engineering hours with Formsort

Given the number of form building solutions out there, teams often ask us, “How is Formsort different from a more basic form builder? How do I know if it’s right for me?” 

Formsort helps PMs and marketers build highly complex, customizable funnels that increase conversion by 20-45%. Our studio lets you build secure forms with advanced logic; customize the design to match your brand’s look and feel; and integrate your form with your backend and favorite analytics tools (Segment, Fullstory, Google Analytics, etc.). Formsort’s the closest equivalent to custom engineering on the market - without, of course, the dependencies on internal engineering.

Basic form builders like Typeform and Jotform are great for simple use cases like waitlist sign-ups. They’re a step above Google forms, but you’ll hit a ceiling pretty quickly. Many Typeform and Jotform users graduate to Formsort once they’re ready to take greater control over their form’s style, logic and testing capabilities.

Read on to learn more about each tool and decide which one is right for you.

How does Formsort compare to Typeform and Jotform?

Formsort’s theme editor gives you full control over your flow design and ensures your forms align with your brand’s design system. You can customize your layout, upload custom logos and fonts, and tailor the look of form components like progress bars and buttons. Once you’ve created a form, you can save it as a theme and iterate on it for future form use cases.

Typeform and Jotform have more guardrails in place, with pre-set layout options and fewer customizable components. For example, Typeform only allows one question per page, while Formsort lets you add multiple questions and customize the layout. Jotform does allow multiple questions per page, but it falls short in other areas (e.g. you can’t customize buttons / progress bars). 

See an example of a form built on Formsort by Candid, and how that form would look on Typeform and Jotform.

                                                The same form built on Typeform. Stock images from Typeform. 

                                                                         The same form built on Jotform.

Form validation: Formsort’s address and email question types will auto-confirm whether data inputs are valid. Address questions can leverage either Google or USPS data. Typeform and Jotform offer basic address validation via widgets, but don’t leverage a native integration.

Variable types: Formsort offers many types of variables that Typeform and Jotform do not: API variables, calculated variables, external variables and custom question types. There’s no limit to the types of questions you can ask your customers. 

Logic: Formsort’s advanced logic means you have full control over the customer journey in your flows. You can incorporate conditional formatting that tailors a user’s experience as they progress through the form. Typeform and Jotform are limited to basic “if, then” logic, which limits your control over the customer journey.

Formsort doesn’t store your data for the long term. We have native integrations with BigQuery, Redshift, PostgreSQL and more, so you can securely store customer data in your own database.

Formsort offers multiple ways to pass data into forms. This avoids repetition and personalizes the responder's experience by pre-filling form answers. Jotform only lets you pass data via URL parameters, and Typeform doesn’t let you pass through any data at all. 

Formsort lets you access returning responder data and lets you choose how often you save data throughout the flow (at every step of the flow, upon completion, etc.). Jotform will send you returning responder data, but doesn’t let you choose the save points. Typeform doesn’t let you access returning responder data.

Both Formsort and Jotform offer split testing so you can experiment with multiple versions of a form and see which one results in the best conversation rate. Typeform doesn’t have this capability. 

In case you need more advanced testing capabilities, Formsort has native integrations with several popular CDP and analytics tools like Segment, Google Analytics, Optimizely, Amplitude, etc. 

Formsort offers all of its customers high-touch support. We understand the form building journey can be taxing and requires multiple iterations. Our team is there for you every step of the way. Typeform and Jotform limit support to their enterprise customers.

See table below for a more detailed comparison of each tool.

You’re creating a simple, one-off form like a waitlist sign-up.

You’re just getting started and don’t need branded flows, form validation or advanced logic.

You aren’t investing in performance marketing, and conversion rates aren’t top of mind for your team.

You’re investing in marketing and want to optimize conversion rates. 

You’re building long-lived forms and need a tool that can meet the evolving needs of your fast-growing company.

You’re a healthcare or financial services company that adheres to strict data security protocols.

You’re looking for a team who will advise and support you along your form building journey.

Curious to learn more about Formsort and what we can do for your business? Check out this tool that shows some of our customization options or sign up for a quick demo!

Understanding how Formsort compares to more basic form builders, and which solution is right for you.

We’ve all been there: sitting beneath harsh fluorescents in a waiting room, filling out page after page of new patient forms just to meet with a care provider. Wouldn’t it be better for everyone if the new patient intake experience was warmer and more inviting? Consumer healthcare companies have the chance to make that change.

Intake forms are often a prospective client’s first interaction with a provider, and every single form design choice impacts a patient's perception of your company. You can curate a digital experience that’s much more personal and comfortable than the traditional waiting room.

Of course, there’s no “one-size-fits-all” form builder solution — your design decisions depend on your brand, your patients, and your goals. Following are some options to consider when building a client intake form for modern patients. 

These days, patients guard their email addresses almost as closely as their Social Security numbers, so how and when you ask for emails in a digital form matters! 

Asking too quickly could cause a responder to exit a form without completing it, but not asking soon enough could mean you lose their data forever. When walking this tightrope, it’s important to think about your company’s value proposition and how you can incorporate that into your email address request.

Here are a few ways to collect client emails: 

Asking for email addresses at the beginning of an intake form offers transparency: the responder understands that they need to provide their email to access the company’s insights or offerings.

For example, Apostrophe asks for the client’s email address immediately, and the email request screen offers clear information on what the user will have access to after providing their contact info.

However, if you are going to ask for contact information off the bat before building a connection with the client, be sure to clearly establish expectations so they understand what they’re agreeing to.

Ask at a transition point in the intake form

Gathering patient email addresses mid-way through an intake form gives you a chance to build trust and offers a natural transition into a different section of the form. This might signal a visual or thematic transition, letting responders know that they are now entering a secure or personal part of the form.

A good example: Hims collects client emails after asking questions about the responder’s relevant health concerns but before diving into more personal questions on medical history and background. 

You can ask for a patient’s email after they’ve completed the intake form but before you deliver their results. This way, they’ve already invested time into the completion of the form, and entering their email is the final step that grants access to the insights or recommendations your company offers.

Cove uses this method, incentivizing patients to provide their email address by asking for it before delivering quiz results.

Informational text that educates about a health concern or contextualizes the intake questions can build trust with patients as they move through the form. Since there’s no face-to-face interaction, informative text can help responders feel both supported and empowered.

That said, you don’t want to overdo it! Information overload can overwhelm consumers and lower conversion rates, whereas insufficient information can leave clients unconvinced of your brand’s value proposition.

The key here is to think about what type of information will best equip new patients to use your product or service.

Incorporating educational information into a patient intake form, either about a general health topic or about your company specifically, can help establish you as a subject-area expert. We all want the people giving us healthcare advice to know what they’re talking about!

For example, Hims does a good job using informational slides between questions to educate, normalize the patient’s experience, and reduce shame around sensitive topics. 

You should also consider how you’ll incorporate educational information into your form. Hims formats informational slides as a loading screen between questions, which automatically disappear after a second or two. 

However, users have to click through Base’s educational slides to arrive at the next question. This can be engaging and give the responder more autonomy over the form experience, but it also means they have to click through more slides, which could potentially deter some responders from completing the form. 

Information to guide users through the form

Supporting text can also help guide the user experience in a form, breaking up longer sections or sharing how certain questions and answers inform the overall process. 

Here’s an example: Base incorporates informational slides after each answer submitted by the patient, simulating the back-and-forth of a conversation and giving the form a personalized feel for the responder.

Similarly, Care/of breaks up sections with informational slides that let the responder know what’s to come in the following section and how the information will be used. 

Visuals are a powerful element in consumer decision-making, which is why adding images and graphics to web forms can help keep responders engaged. Images also allow you to communicate effectively and precisely so that patients don’t feel confused. There’s nothing worse than feeling uncertain when you’re seeking healthcare expertise.

There are many ways to include visuals when building forms, and how and where you use them depends on your goals, brand, and prospective patients. Here are some common types of visuals in new patient forms:

Photos of other patients, like the below example from Noom, can lend legitimacy to your brand and build trust during the new patient intake process.

Sometimes, images are a more effective way to communicate a concept. 

In this first question on Candid’s intake form, the included graphics quickly and directly communicate the concept, which shortens and simplifies the form while also offering the patient a reflection of their own experience.

Plus, Candid offers a great example of a company that increased its sales by optimizing its patient intake form. Teledentistry is a new service, so the company needed to build trust and educate customers on the benefits of using clear aligners to straighten teeth. The incorporation of on-brand visual elements was fundamental to this particular form design.

Incorporating visuals throughout a form is a solid way to establish branding consistency and keep responders engaged. 

Patients completing intake forms are about to give you sensitive healthcare information, so you want the form to look professional and put together. Fortunately, you can go above and beyond the dingy waiting rooms of the past to build trust with modern clients!

For example, Care/of uses graphics that match the brand’s approachable, hip design, which creates a cohesive user experience from start to finish and clearly demonstrates the careful consideration they put into building the form.

The sky’s the limit when it comes to patient intake form design. There’s no conclusive best practice for implementing any of the above concepts, and the best way to figure out what works for your brand is to test and iterate over time.

That’s where a form builder like Formsort can help. We empower consumer healthcare companies to create highly customizable forms that integrate with your tech stack and evolve with your business. 

And the best part? You won’t be limited by your engineering team’s bandwidth. Your PMs, marketers and designers can test multiple flows to curate the best possible patient experience. Formsort helps you upgrade from the traditional waiting room experience and build digital onboarding that’s as modern and dynamic as your company. 

Sign up to learn more about Formsort and start building with us!

Intake forms are your first touchpoint with prospective patients - it's important to get them right.

Best practices for designing a client intake form

Your app’s onboarding interface is valuable real estate, and designers are always experimenting with ways to make the most of this space. One common example of this is the sidebar. 

Sidebars usually appear on either side of the screen in a desktop layout, and above or below other material in a mobile layout. They’re a great way to feature social proof, value props, and legal information on your website or app.

Not all flows have sidebars, but the most effective ones encourage customer sign-ups by adding valuable context and information. We analyzed the sidebars of Roman, Robinhood and DBT and shared our thoughts below.

We don’t think there’s one “right” way to design your onboarding experience. We built Formsort so you can play around with different options and see what works best for your product. Here’s some inspiration!

Hair loss treatment brand Roman uses a left-hand sidebar that features a customer testimonial, value props and legal disclosures. The sign-up form is on the right-hand side of the screen. 

On mobile, the sidebar appears below the sign-up form and the content is condensed: the testimonial is the same, but only one value prop is featured and the legal disclosures are removed.

When the customer continues to the sign-up flow, the sidebar disappears, leaving a single column of form content on the screen.

Customer reviews are prominent, showcasing social proof. 

Prominent product value props encourage customers to fill out the form and enter the funnel. 

A strong call-to-action flows smoothly to the sign-up form. 

Legal links are appropriately peripheral – easy to find, but not taking up valuable space. 

On mobile, the form precedes the sidebar information, prioritizing the main content and the launch of the customer journey. 

Transitioning from a two-column layout to a single-column layout keeps the customer’s attention on the form once credibility is established and it's time to focus on providing data. 

Having the sidebar on the left-hand side of the desktop version means it will be the first thing most customers will read. If it’s presented without context, it could waste valuable engagement time and appear cluttered. 

Transitioning a UI from single-column to two-column within the experience can feel inconsistent and jarring to a responder.

Hair loss can be deeply personal, and a company like Roman needs to build trust with the customer quickly in order to encourage them to sign-up. Roman’s sidebar builds that trust through testimonials and product features such as ongoing medical support, and seals the deal with the promise of free shipping. It’s an excellent value add, especially in the more compact mobile layout. 

Investment app Robinhood uses a sidebar that appears only in a desktop/laptop format, but not on mobile. When it is present, the Robinhood sidebar appears on the left-hand side and consists of context-setting information and graphics. 

On mobile, the graphic appears as a separate screen, and each piece of information is collected on its own screen. 

The sidebar continues for several screens in the desktop flow, with the color and graphic elements changing over time. This differentiation helps set the tone for each stage of onboarding.

The sidebar content sets the scene for the main content, priming the customer on what’s to come and what the UX will be like once they’re signed up. 

The contrasting color of the sidebar sets it apart from the main content, while the graphics add personality. 

Removing the sidebar for mobile may help guide the customer through the onboarding journey by creating a simpler sign-up process. 

Not having a sidebar on mobile increases the number of screens customers have to go through, and could introduce friction in the sign-up process. 

A contrasting sidebar is a great way to set your main content apart, and to integrate brand visuals.Changing the sidebar color at each stage of onboarding creates a visual progression for the customer.

TIP: A sidebar can set the tone for the main content. Tell your customer about the form they’re about to use, so they feel equipped and empowered to enter the funnel.

Database warehousing tool dbt uses a contrasting sidebar that highlights value props and brand colors while flowing smoothly into the main content on desktop. 

On mobile, however, the sidebar precedes the main content. 

The sidebar design features several value props.

The use of brand colors and contrast adds personality to the page overall.

The sidebar flows seamlessly into the main content.

On mobile, the sidebar fills the entire screen. This may create more work for the customer, as the most important aspects of the page require users to scroll.

If you choose to keep your mobile and desktop designs the same, it’s important to ensure that your sidebar content is truly essential, as it will bury the main content until users scroll.

Sidebars can provide important context, value props, and social proof that gets customers excited about your product.

Sidebar graphics can set the tone for your brand. 

Optimizing a sidebar for specific devices ensures a more consistent customer journey across platforms. 

Cluttered or poorly-designed sidebars can distract users. 

A sidebar doesn’t always make sense on every step of the primary content.

Ready to experiment with some designs? Start building with Formsort!

Tips for incorporating sidebars into your sign-up form based on Roman, Robinhood, and dbt.

Using sidebars in customer onboarding funnels

In a multi-step form flow, questions are distributed across pages and are answered a few at a time. Shouldn't you also receive answers immediately after users enter them? 

Receiving form data upon completion vs. after every step

Many form builders provide one choice: sending data at the end, when the user completes the flow. This makes sense—after all, a fully completed form is the happy path, and is what you want to happen.

However, only receiving data at the end has a big downside: you do not receive partial responses.

Most non-trivial form flows don't have anywhere near 100% conversion (in fact, nearly 68% of all forms are abandoned), but partial responses can contain useful information about the users who didn't complete. 

Partial responses may actually contain more important lessons for conversion improvement than full responses, as they provide hints as to why individuals or segments of users aren't successfully converting. If your form builder only provides the option to receive answers upon submission, you lose the opportunity to engage with this actionable user feedback.

Another common approach, if your form builder supports it, is to receive data after each step or page of the form is completed. This way, you will receive all of the partial data along the way, and can analyze the series of answers provided by individual responders.

The problem with this approach is the opposite as collecting all form responses upon submission - you will end up with too much data coming through the firehose. If you are viewing form responses in a database query result or table, most of the rows will be partial responses—not even necessarily the latest ones. 

Introducing debounced submission for abandoned forms

Today we are introducing debounced submission, available in our webhooks, BigQuery, RedShift and Postgres integrations, to make working with form data easier.

Enabling this submission frequency allows you to receive answer payloads in a way that balances having all of the data, without having too many intermediate payloads:

A payload is sent immediately if the user completes the flow (just like in the Receiving form data upon completion approach described above)

A payload is sent 5 minutes after the last user interaction, if the user has abandoned the flow.

The result is that, if you are receiving data in a database, most of the time you would have one clean row per responder session containing all completed form fields, as many as had been provided by the time of completion or abandonment.

If you're curious about where 5 minutes comes from, we've seen that >95% of users do not continue a form filling session after 5 minutes of inactivity.

By consolidating partial form responses into a single row of data, sessions can be grouped together for broader behavioral analysis. This data can help you surface patterns of user drop-offs and quickly identify the bottlenecks in your form. Formsort allows you to publish form variants without engineering which enables you to test against abandoned form data to identify the version that meets your goals. 

This can be especially useful for segmenting users for retargeting opportunities based on their form progress using UUIDs, pixels, or other identity resolution techniques, especially If sequenced messaging is a part of your marketing strategy. Retargeting goals may also inform how you optimize your form fields to make sure you are capturing PII or other identifying information early in the interaction.

We hope that this will enable cleaner, more succinct data sets that empower your marketing teams to optimize your form flows quickly and confidently.

See our documentation on frequencies of receiving form data to learn more about data delivery options in Formsort or learn how you can start building with us today.

Receive all answers per form session in one row of data, completed or not.

New: capture partial form fills with debounced submit

The user journey has become more high-touch yet automated than ever. Using forms for client engagement is not new or novel, but the average users' expectations for their interactions have changed. The first conversations users start with your business are often through forms. When designing a user journey, your goal is to keep conversations going through efficiency and personalization.

Generally, third-party form builders support surveys or simple use cases like a contact form. However, in an early-stage business, these form solutions are attractive for ease of implementation and an affordable alternative to engineering your forms.

Unfortunately, simple form builders don't offer features required for a high-value customer-facing onboarding, marketing, or support, flow for businesses serious about scaling. Keeping design and data in sync with rapid iterations can quickly become unmanageable if you aren't laying the groundwork for scale in your user journey from the beginning.  

Branding matters and psychology agrees. With competition for users' attention increasing across devices and channels, their consideration stage may be more extended when making purchasing decisions.  Having consistent design makes your brand more memorable and fosters trust. The aesthetic and heuristics of your website or application UX are an essential part of streamlining user behavior.

Many form builders help you get up and running by offering pre-built templates with an easy-to-use drag and drop functionality. While this is great for a newer or smaller business, as your design system matures, it's less likely your form builder will keep up. Depending on how big the delta is, your form design can get out of sync with the rest of your web app.

Scaling form elements for different browsers and devices is essential for clients with multiple products/services or high-volume traffic applications and design variants for those devices. Formsort allows you to easily design templated, integrated forms that are a seamless part of your web properties.

Suppose you're going through a more extensive design overhaul or are implementing your forms for the first time. In that case, there will need to be a close collaboration with design and engineering that isn't always feasible when other development initiatives take priority. Formsort unblocks designers by recreating their design system in our studio, including custom fonts and CSS attributes, empowering them to iterate and deploy design changes safely without using engineering resources.

Transparency and easy access to data is increasingly more critical in day-to-day decision-making. Of course, your form responses will be available in a form builder, or maybe even your database, but if they can't be surfaced by the right people quickly, they aren't beneficial.

Often comparing the results against other key data points like how users interact with other parts of your process is necessary to get the complete picture of user behavior. Most form builders integrate with Google Analytics, but many organizations often need to analyze proprietary data and custom events in data lakes or analytics platforms.

Formsort prioritizes data stores as a central part of our users' setups. In addition to on-platform analytics to analyze the performance of variants and responses, Formsort seamlessly sends data to your warehouses to be leveraged in your business intelligence workflow without replication. 

Integrations, APIs, plug-ins. It all sounds so easy until you start to read the documentation. Web apps are made up of several languages and software to deliver the user experience. So what works for your app may not always translate to the integrations that your form builder can support.

Generally, there is a bias toward prioritizing essential marketing integrations. Depending on your use case, you may not see the need to integrate your data organization fully into your form builder. Still, between data transformations and evolving business demands, your form builder may grow into an essential source of truth that requires easy access to and sharing of the data collected across your organization.

Managing a form codebase to support more complex initiatives is an option, but Formsort integrates with your stack, and your stack integrates with Formsort. As a result, you can connect your database, analytics infrastructure and add in best-in-class point solutions without maintaining a custom form codebase.

Funnel Optimization and Testing Funnel Analytics

When building or supporting a complex user journey, you need to have visibility into what is happening every step of the way. For example, your form analytics need to get granular to understand how users are responding to a form variant or troubleshooting the operability of a form flow integration.

Optimizing conversion rates is an ongoing journey that requires you to respond to evolving user feedback. If you are a growth-centric company focusing on KPIs, selecting a form builder that enables experimentation and A/B Testing is vital as your marketing goals increase in complexity. 

Opacity may not be a problem when you ask five simple questions. However, when your operations depend on it, there are a lot of dollars behind even small initiatives like copy changes. If you want to make decisions about minor variations to design or copy, you need a robust form builder with on-platform analytics that measures the impact of your changes.

Whether today or in the future, one or more of these pieces of functionality could put your user journey at odds with your form builder. When choosing the right technology partner for non-native forms, take some time to think about how you expect or hope your userbase to grow or evolve in the coming months.

With Formsort, you can build branded flows that fit seamlessly into your application by applying your design system across all of your forms. In addition to prioritizing the look and feel of your forms, Formsort is a trustworthy data partner and advocate that does not save your data, making it secure by design. Finally, by integrating into the rest of your stack, Formsort is built to work alongside your tool suite to help you engage your users every step of the way.

Are you ready to start building forms with the simplicity of a drag and drop editor, the capabilities of a customer data platform, and the reliability of a first-party application? If so, Formsort is here to grow with you.

Is your survey builder empowering or complicating your user journey? Forms need to keep conversations going as your business is growing.

Don't build your user journey on survey builders

Since 2017, Candid has offered a simpler way to help people improve their smile. The company delivers custom clear teeth aligners straight to your door for 65% less than braces. Thanks to optical laser scans and advanced 3D printing, Candid’s board-certified orthodontists can remotely supervise treatments so customers get to skip time-consuming office visits.

Teledentistry is a new service so Candid’s ability to build trust and educate customers on the benefits of using clear aligners to straighten teeth has been a vital part of their success. Candid’s “Am I a Candidate” survey provides a safe space for potential customers to determine whether clear aligners are right for them. Optimizing Candid's “Am I a Candidate” survey on Formsort has increased sales by over 30%.

Client challenges: Off-the-shelf solutions lacked flexibility and security, but custom coding wasn't scaling with their demand

Cosgrove’s team of product managers, designers, and engineers are in charge of Candid’s entire online experience. While their existing survey worked, their home-grown infrastructure lacked flexibility, making testing new variants a cumbersome and engineering-intensive endeavor. 

Co-founder and CIO, Lilla Cosgrove, explained “We chose to build our survey ourselves because in 2017 there weren’t off-the-shelf tools that would give us the flexibility to express our brand and to deeply integrate into our technology stack while ensuring the security we required as a healthcare business.” She felt they needed a more flexible and robust solution to better personalize their customer experience and to evolve alongside their increasingly complex marketing initiatives.

Formsort solutions: High fidelity branding, seamless integrations, and simple deployments

Still there were critical concerns with using a third party solution. The team at Candid started by evaluating existing off the shelf tools and found them underpowered.  With the exception of Formsort, there weren’t offerings that allowed Candid to stay on brand, maintain a consistent data set of events and answers, and integrate with the rest of their tools. 

The survey was the starting point for the majority of their customers so it needed to be perfectly in sync with the broader look and feel of the Candid site. “We were very happy to see the incredibly fine-grained control of the UX available in Formsort” said Candid Senior Product Designer Ethan McDonald. “Even the smallest details like button shadow and our progress bar were re-creatable.”

Staying in control of customer data and maintaining an accurate single source of truth was of paramount importance to Candid’s engineering team. The onboarding survey needed to integrate into the broader marketing tech stack so that their carefully curated customer journey could be instrumented and actioned upon. 

Integrating with complex business logic was among the companies must have features. Candid uses a customer’s zip code as one input to surface the best treatment option available; if a customer is not within the service area of a Candid studio where their teeth can be easily scanned, they are instead presented with the option to order an impression kit. To achieve this type of complex decisioning-based on customer answers, Formsort integrates seamlessly with Candid’s backend APIs to handle custom conditional logic.

After migrating the survey to Formsort, the Candid team began experimenting with survey variants to optimize for conversions. They tested several different variants including earlier branching of respondents based on problem type, changing up the look and feel of the form, and introducing testimonial pictures and video. 

All of this testing could be done directly on the Formsort platform freeing up the engineering and product team to tackle other issues. Dan McClean, Director of Growth Product, explained “we push most of our users through a survey flow which tells them whether they are candidates for our company's product. We've been able to improve conversion rate through the survey substantially, and have increased sales at least 30% by optimizing the survey experience. Formsort makes it easy to make changes and push them live to customers.”

Results: Faster learnings, time savings and better conversion rates

Candid’s approach to ramping up Formsort involved splitting traffic between their existing in-house infrastructure and the same content on the Formsort platform. To compare the two systems, Candid measured kit and studio booking completion rates for eligible customers. 

Formsort meaningfully lowered the activation energy required to improve their survey. Since getting started with Formsort, Candid has averaged over 27 published revisions per month ranging from small copy changes to larger content restructuring.

In the initial ramp-up phase Candid saw a meaningful lift in conversion rates as a result of the performance and stability of the Formsort platform; the content-controlled experiment resulted in an unexpected double digit percentage improvement in completions versus the original in-house infrastructure.

With a rapidly expanding business, Candid's engineers needed to reserve their bandwidth for feature development, not form maintenance. As marketing requests for form updates started to become a burden, Formsort empowered the marketing and product team to make those changes themselves, saving countless engineering hours.

In the initial ramp-up phase Candid saw a meaningful lift in conversion rates as a result of the performance and stability of the Formsort platform; the content-controlled experiment resulted in an unexpected double digit percentage improvement in completion versus in-house infrastructure. Candid’s approach to ramping up Formsort involved splitting traffic between their existing in-house infrastructure and the same content on the Formsort platform. To compare the two systems, Candid measured kit and studio booking completion rates for eligible customers. 

Head of Product

We've been able to improve conversion rate through the survey substantially, and have increased sales at least 30% by optimizing the survey experience. Formsort makes it easy to make changes and push them live to customers.

See how Candid leveraged Formsort's design, integration, and testing tools to increase sales via their "Am I a Candidate?" survey.

How Candid increased sales by 30% with better patient onboarding

So, your business needs to build a form. It may seem like a simple request, but behind every feature request is a product manager who is responsible for defining where the requirements of the feature begins and ends. Forms are a crucial part of web applications, but the effort of building and maintaining them is often overlooked in an initial scope. 

As businesses scale and more niche services come online, many of their form requirements can't be satisfied by third party low code form builders. This often brings product managers and developers to a crossroads where they have to decide to trade functionality for ease, or start down the path of custom coding their forms. 

With 32% of an average developers time being spent on existing code maintenance and testing, it's important to plan for how these tradeoffs will have a downstream impact on servicing your web presence as your business grows. While building a form may seem like a one-off project for a development team, often there are hidden costs that come with the decision to build and maintain your own web forms. 

Are low code form builders not working for your business? Here's what product managers need to know about the hidden costs of building and maintaining forms before you start to custom code a solution.

Sort of a blog

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Formsort vs. Typeform and Jotform

Best practices for designing a client intake form

Using sidebars in customer onboarding funnels

New: capture partial form fills with debounced submit

Don't build your user journey on survey builders

How Candid increased sales by 30% with better patient onboarding

Low code or custom code? A product manager’s guide to tradeoffs

Form deployment options

Pitfalls of building your own form flows