Today, I’m excited to introduce Formsort to the public! 

We've been heads down for a while helping product and marketing teams double their conversion rates and reduce engineering costs with our software. Our low-code form builder helps teams build and optimize their most important flows: sign-up, check-ins, quizzes and more. 

We believe that form infrastructure should be owned by product managers and marketers – not just engineers. With self-serve, we’re bringing highly customizable form building to everyone.

Sign up for a free account and start building. Read on to learn more about Formsort's story and how our product works.

Our founding team helped start Better, where we moved the mortgage application process online. The first step in getting a mortgage — pre-approval — was our first touchpoint with customers, so we invested significant time and resources to get it right.

Pre-approval was essentially a complicated flow: we collected sensitive data from our leads through a well-designed UX; pulled their financial data via APIs; qualified them with complex business logic; and securely stored all of the results in our systems.

As Better's Head of Product, my team created the vision for this experience, but our engineering team had to build it from scratch. Each change, from mundane copy updates to complicated 3rd party integrations, was a project that could take weeks to get prioritized and implemented. This significantly slowed down our ability to test and optimize the experience.

We observed this pattern of inefficiency in every industry moving complex transactions online: healthcare, financial services, SaaS and e-commerce. Over 90% of any sign-up flow is generic, yet every company rebuilt the same components from scratch: styles, state management, data processing, and more. When we looked at available tools, popular form builders like Typeform and Jotform were too limited in functionality, and weren’t helping tech companies with their complex product form infrastructure. 

That’s why we built Formsort – to empower product and marketing teams to build complex flows, without engineers.

Formsort is a highly extensible and customizable hosted form builder platform. You can edit design, content, and logic within our studio - you don't need to run anything or host anything. Your flows can be embedded or accessed directly. We don't own your form data - we just make sure it's passed through safely to your systems of record and analytics stack.

Build flows that look native to your product

Your brand is unique. Our theme editor lets you build flows that are consistent with your brand’s design. You can customize every single component of your flow, from background colors down to individual states of buttons. Get the design flexibility of a custom coded flow - without writing a single line of code. 

Personalize responder experiences using complex logic

No two people are the same, so don't treat your responders as such. Our conditional logic editor lets you send responders down personalized paths depending on their responses to each of your questions.

For more complex, real-time calculations - like mental health assessments or drug price lookup - you can develop a calculated variable or populate answer choices from your own backend via API.

You should own your data - not us. Our platform has native integrations with the most common data stores: BigQuery, PostgreSQL, Redshift, and even Google Sheets. Use Webhooks for everything else. 

You can also send data to multiple data destinations, pull data back into the flow via custom questions, and ensure teammates don't accidentally break anything with validations and flow-level schemas.

If you want to send data to analytics destinations, we have native integrations with tools like Segment, Google Analytics, Optimizely, and Amplitude.

Maintain a high degree of data privacy and security

Data privacy has been a core part of Formsort’s philosophy since day 1. Formsort is SOC 2 Type II certified and HIPAA compliant, meaning we’ll sign a Business Associate Agreement (BAA) with you.

Customers use Formsort throughout their product’s user journeys. Check out some use cases below, and learn how customers have increased conversion rates and reduced engineering costs using our platform.

Allara, a digital healthcare start-up for treating Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS), builds their onboarding flow and monthly check-in flows using Formsort. Their sign-up conversion rate has increased by over 100%, and their form building time has decreased by 80%. Learn more here.

Vial is a Clinical Research Organization (CRO) reimagining clinical trials. They use Formsort to power their clinical trial sign-up flows, and have seen completion rates increase by 30%. Learn more here.

Balance Homes, a real estate technology start-up, uses Formsort to power its onboarding flow and internal sales qualification flow. The team has saved the equivalent work of one full-time engineer. Learn more here.

If you or someone you know has a form worth fixing - sign up for a free account, or reach out to sales@formsort.com with any questions. We can’t wait to see what you build!

Now, any team can use Formsort to build and optimize their flows

Balance Homes is a real estate technology company leveraging a co-investment model. Balance Homes lowers homeowners’ monthly payments and helps them stay in their homes by co-investing in the property and paying down existing debt. They also provide flexible buy-out options that empower homeowners to get out of debt faster.

Balance’s co-founder, Aaron LaRue, has several years of fintech experience, and firmly believes fintech onboarding flows shouldn’t be built in-house. After launching their MVP using Typeform, Balance Homes switched over to Formsort to build a more sophisticated onboarding flow with complex logic, 3rd party integrations and greater design customization.

Now, Balance Homes has built half a dozen flows using Formsort, from customer onboarding to sales qualification. By switching to Formsort, the team has saved the equivalent work of one full-time engineer, significant given the company’s small size (<25 full-time employees).

Client challenges: Other form builders can’t address fintechs’ complex onboarding challenges

Like many fintechs, Balance Homes’ onboarding flow is the product. Many downstream product experiences are tied to the information collected during sign-up. For example, identity verification authenticates incoming leads, while questions around property type and remaining mortgage balance help inform a prospect’s proposal. All of these complexities require advanced features like conditional routing, data schema management, and seamless third party integrations, which are often lacking in more basic form builders.

Aaron was excited to try out Formsort due to its unique founding story. As early employees of Better, the Formsort founders were intimately familiar with the form challenges in the real estate industry, and used this experience to inform Formsort’s feature set. Once the team helped him upgrade his pre-existing Typeform into a more custom flow, he knew Formsort was the right solution for his business.

Formsort solutions: Highly customizable form builder that plugs into fintechs’ tech stack 

Since the onboarding flow is a critical part of Balance’s product experience, the team wanted to ensure its style aligned with the rest of their design system. The Balance Homes team achieved the design flexibility and control it needed using Formsort. A few highlights include:

Background colors, progress bars and button styles aligned to their brand design. The team shared a prototype of their flow in Figma, and was able to replicate the design inside of Formsort’s studio. Color variables allowed the team to standardize the look and feel of design components throughout the flow.

Sharing legal disclosures and getting consent from customers. Balance Homes operates in a highly regulated space, and needs to make sure prospective customers understand how the product works, their privacy policy and their terms and conditions. The team was able to easily share these policies using Formsort’s confirmation and informational question types.

Formsort integrates seamlessly with Balance Homes’ tech stack:

Leads often come across Balance Homes on their Webflow-powered marketing website, or a third party marketplace like NerdWallet. 

When a lead clicks on the “Get started” CTA on the marketing website or NerdWallet, they’re directed to the Formsort flow, which passes through any relevant UTM parameters. 

Once a lead finalizes the flow, Formsort data is sent via webhooks to AWS and Firebase for data handling and storage, respectively. All of the form fields from the Formsort flow are used to create a record of the lead in Balance Homes’ database. 

From here, several 3rd party services (e.g., Alloy, LexisNexis, Retool) are called to verify identity, evaluate risk, and conduct other validations.

Conditional routing allows the Balance Homes team to determine if a lead qualifies for the service, and what type of service makes the most sense for them. Formsort’s conditional logic allowed the team to quickly qualify leads based on property type, geography, and other attributes. 

Balance Homes’ Product Manager and sales team now manage all of the company’s flows. By streamlining engineers’ involvement in the form building process, Balance Homes has saved the work of one full-time engineer, equating to thousands of engineering hours and significant cost savings.

“We haven't had an engineer build a form in the 15 months that we've been a company,” said Aaron. “By switching to Formsort, we’re able to put our engineers on higher value problems.”

Accelerating lead qualification for sales 

Balance’s sales team now uses a Formsort flow to accelerate thousands of lead qualifications. Once a lead is submitted via the onboarding flow, a member of Balance’s sales team schedules a follow-up call to generate a proposal for the homeowner. The sales team member uses a Formsort flow to capture all of the information during this call, and sends that data to Retool. Anytime the sales team wants to tweak their discovery call script or add/remove questions, they can easily make these form changes inside of Formsort. 

Cofounder

“Funnel optimization is the number one thing start-ups can do to grow efficiently. It’s a challenging problem that everyone faces, and takes up a lot of venture dollars. 

In fintech, optimizing onboarding funnels can be very complex since it’s so closely tied to the product: you need conditional routing based on certain responses; your forms need to collect the right information to qualify customers using third party systems (identity, fraud, credit); and your forms need to manage your data and seamlessly integrate with several third party systems. Formsort makes it incredibly easy to build and optimize this form infrastructure.”

Want to see how Formsort can help your business? Start building for free today. 

Learn how Balance Homes saved thousands of engineering hours by switching to Formsort

Balance Homes optimizes their fintech signup flow with Formsort

Whether you’re a one person startup or a Fortune 500 company, data storage is a core piece of your tech stack. At Formsort, we help you securely collect responder data and send it to your destination of choice.

Up until now, we've required you to store responder data in a traditional database (Redshift, PostgreSQL, BigQuery) or send data to another destination via webhooks. However, some business-facing teams don’t have the engineering resources to set up and maintain this data infrastructure.

Our new Google Sheets integration offers a new solution for these teams. Now, teams without a database can easily capture responder data and store it securely within Google Sheets - without looping in engineering.

Google Sheets is a web-based application for creating, editing and sharing spreadsheets. If you have a Google account, you have access to Google Sheets for free!

This Google Sheets integration is native and doesn't require connecting to any third party automation tool like Zapier.

When you create questions in a Formsort flow, you’re automatically creating the response schema that will show up in the sheet as columns. As a responder completes your flow, the response will be inserted into the Google sheet according to the schema. One row will equal one unique form response.

How can I get started using Formsort’s Google Sheets integration?

If you don’t already have a Formsort account you can create one here. When you're ready to connect your form to Google Sheets, check out this documentation for step-by-step guidance.

When should I use Google Sheets and when should I use a traditional database?

You or your business uses the Google suite of products

The traffic to your form is low. Using Google Sheets will count towards your Google API limits. Formsort cannot guarantee delivery of responses if this limit is reached

You have a one-off form for a small use case

You need to quickly get your form up and running, and you have no engineering resources

You’re a healthcare business that needs HIPAA compliance and have signed a Business Associate Agreement (BAA) with Google Workspace products. Note: Google Sheets uses high-level encryption to safeguard protected health information (PHI), but you still need to sign a BAA as this data will be stored on Google’s servers

You have high traffic volume to your form (100s of responders a day). You’re at higher risk of hitting the Google API limit we mentioned in the previous section

You have concerns that data in Google Sheets will be edited or deleted. Remember that whoever has access to the sheet can modify data

You want the durability, consistency, and query capabilities of a traditional database

You’re a healthcare business that needs HIPAA compliance but haven’t signed a BAA with Google Workspace products

If any of the above statements are true, you should store responder data in a traditional database. Formsort offers integrations for Redshift, PostgreSQL and BigQuery. For anything else, you can use webhooks.

This new integration makes it possible for any team to use Formsort for their most important flows. 

In the near future, look out for features like customizing which responses are sent in the payload, and creating a new Google sheet straight from the integration.

Want to learn more? Check out our docs or chat with our team.

Send form data to Google Sheets directly - without involving engineers or 3rd party workarounds

Introducing our Google Sheets integration

Today, we’re excited to announce that Formsort is SOC 2 Type II compliant. Our platform, technology, processes, and procedures have been assessed by Prescient Assurance – an external, independent auditor – and we have met the highest standards.

SOC 2 is a process a company undergoes to assure their customers that their data is securely managed to protect their interests as well as the privacy of their users. SOC 2 defines five trust service principles for managing customer data: security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality, and privacy.

External auditors like Prescient Assurance determine whether a vendor complies with one or more of the five trust principles based on the systems and processes in place, and issue a certificate of compliance. In addition to Prescient, we leveraged Secureframe to automate our SOC 2 certification process.



How is SOC 2 Type II compliance different from SOC 2 Type I compliance?

A SOC 2 Type I certificate demonstrates the effectiveness of controls in an organization at a specific point in time. The SOC 2 Type I report describes the controls provided by the management of the organization and attests to their suitability. 

In contrast to a one-time check, SOC 2 Type II monitors the controls over time and also checks their operating effectiveness. As a result, the SOC 2 Type II evaluation process is more rigorous and reliable. Many companies prefer Type II certification when evaluating a vendor’s security posture.

Why is SOC 2 Type II certification important for a company like Formsort?

Many of our customers operate in highly regulated industries like healthcare and financial services, and trust us to keep their form data secure.

A SOC 2 Type II certification assures our customers that Formsort maintains a high level of information security. Testing these requirements (via penetration tests and other audit tests) can ensure that sensitive information is handled well over time, rather than just once. It gives our customers even greater peace of mind.


What other security standards does Formsort adhere to?

Formsort is also HIPAA compliant. This means that we follow a set of regulatory guidelines that outline how Protected Health Information (PHI) can be used and disclosed in a lawful manner. 


If you’d like a copy of Formsort’s SOC 2 Type II report, talk to our team.

Announcing Formsort’s SOC 2 Type II certification

Virtual care for polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) 

Allara is a one-stop virtual care center and community for women with polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS). The company pairs clients with a medical provider and registered dietitian, who work together on a holistic care program that includes diagnostic testing, video appointments, and nutritional and lifestyle counseling. Forms are used throughout this care coordination and provision. 

After launching its MVP, the Allara team wanted to upgrade their form to focus on conversion and scalability. They needed a form building solution that would give them the flexibility and customization of custom-engineered forms, without relying on internal engineering resources. The team found Formsort through a customer referral and built a revamped version of their onboarding flow in a few days. After that, they launched several more forms to collect data throughout the patient journey, like monthly check-ins and templatized mental health assessments. 

Allara has seen its onboarding conversion rate more than double since switching to Formsort. In addition, the team has seen an 80% reduction in form building time. Allara now provides better, more responsive care by leveraging diagnostic and check-in flows throughout the patient journey. 

Client challenges: In-house flows were inefficient but other form builders lacked customization

Allara’s first onboarding flow was a simple, custom-built intake form to accompany their MVP and was intended to hold them over for the first 6 months. However, even with simple forms, teams can struggle with role division and clarity, dependencies, parent-child relationships, and integrations. Molly McGrath, Head of Product at Allara, knew it would be more efficient to leverage a form building tool to create the robust forms they needed. 

Molly was looking for a completely customizable solution. She wanted the form design to align with the company’s brand and didn’t want it to look like her team was using a third party tool. In addition, she wanted enough structure around data entry so that a PM couldn’t break the code. Lastly, she wanted a tool that could connect with the rest of their tech stack: PostgreSQL for HIPAA-compliant data storage and auth0 for account creation.

Formsort solutions: Flexible, HIPAA compliant form builder for digital health companies 

The onboarding flow is the first interaction between Allara and prospective patients, so its design needs to align with the rest of Allara’s website. Allara achieved both its logic and customization needs using Formsort. A few highlights include:

Lead qualification via state eligibility: Allara is licensed to operate in several states, and can quickly qualify leads based on their state of residence.

Informational screens: Informational screens provide in-the-moment context and help generate trust with the responder. Allara’s informational screens are personalized to the responder’s reported concerns (see below for an example).

According to Molly, many form building tools can either feel too simplistic or incur “death by a thousand cuts.” In other words, they offer a great deal of flexibility but open up many potential points of form error, e.g. if someone makes a mistake setting up the JSON schema, the form won’t work. Formsort’s built-in validation protects flows from breaking in the development phase. Formsort lets you validate common fields like phone number, dates, and email addresses(including auto-correction of common email domain typos).

With Formsort’s built-in validations, product managers and content editors can develop their flow variants knowing they have a strong safety net as they play around with questions, conditional logic, and input types. For example, if Molly added a question dependent on another question, but accidentally switched around the order, Formsort would flag the issue, saving her time and frustration. 

“I (once) spent an entire Saturday handwriting out the mappings of a form and then spent hours going through JSONLint to figure out where my error was. That’s such a painful process and a poor use of a PM’s time. [. . .] Formsort just completely eliminates that pain for me,” said Molly. 

Templates for mental health screening  

Anxiety and depression are comorbid with PCOS and are also treated in a holistic PCOS care plan. Mental health screening forms can be time-consuming to build from scratch, so Allara asked the Formsort team to build some diagnostic tool templates for these disorders based on pre-existing, clinically validated assessments: the PHQ-9, PHQ-4, and GAD-7. The Formsort team shared a usable template of the patient health questionnaire (PHQ) in 1 day.

Now, Allara can easily incorporate mental health screeners in patient touch points like monthly check-ins - all they have to do is choose the template and apply their custom design theme. These short assessments use calculated variables to assign values to patient responses and calculate an aggregate score. This score can then be used as guidance to understand patients’ mental health status and customize treatment. Mental health assessment templates are now available to all Formsort customers. 

Formsort set up a dedicated Slack channel and scheduled regular check-ins to make sure Allara was getting the support they needed. This level of support was a crucial differentiator for Molly: “Most vendor tools have a long waiting period, even for simple tickets, which can block our team. That’s not the case with Formsort”. 

Allara saw the conversion rate on its sign-up flow more than double using Formsort vs. their previous, custom-built form. This was primarily driven by improved form design and faster experimentation timelines. 

Allara has reduced their onboarding flow-build time by over 80%: from 2+ weeks with an engineer working full-time, to 2 days where engineering work is limited to integration setup. Oftentimes the team can deploy new variants the same day they’re created. 

By using Formsort, the Allara team has freed up time to focus on critical strategic questions. Instead of focusing on the nuts and bolts of flows, like form logic and schema standardization, the Allara team can think about more business strategy: for example, what kinds of questions should they be asking their patients to effectively diagnose and improve their PCOS symptoms?

Leveraging Formsort throughout the patient journey

While Allara’s initial flow use case was just onboarding, they now use Formsort to collect data throughout the patient experience. Whenever the Allara team wants to ask a patient a question, they use the “theme” functionality to quickly spin up a Formsort flow in their brand’s design. 

The team has launched over half a dozen different flows in this way, from onboarding to monthly check-ins. Collecting this data in one tool allows Allara to build comprehensive patient profiles over time.   

Head of Product

I talk to so many Heads of Product at early-stage start-ups and every single time I tell them: if you're considering quizzes or intake forms for onboarding, do not build it in-house. It's a significant drain of resources. It’s going to be flimsy, it’s going to break. It doesn’t make sense to invest in making it flexible upfront because you don’t know what you need. Buy a flexible solution like Formsort and it’s going to be 10x better than what you could’ve built, and 10x faster than what you could’ve built.

Want to see how Formsort can help your business? Chat with our team.

Learn how Allara increased conversion rates by over 100%, and reduced form building timelines by 80%

Allara more than doubles conversion rates using Formsort

Formsort is rolling out a series of templates that enable our customers to launch flows at the click of a button. Our first templates are for the most common mental health intake assessments: PHQ-9, PHQ-4, and GAD-7. These templates include clinically validated questions and scoring frameworks designed to screen for the presence of depressive and anxiety disorders. 

Why we started with mental health intake templates

Mental health disorders can be comorbid with other illnesses and can be aggravated by stressful or traumatic events. The COVID-19 pandemic was a perfect storm that led to spikes in depression and anxiety rates. According to the CDC, from August 2020 to February 2021 alone, the percentage of adults with recent symptoms of anxiety or a depressive disorder increased by 15%, from 36.4% to 41.5% (source). In order to keep up with the increased demand for mental healthcare services, practitioners need the right digital tools to efficiently analyze and track symptoms amongst patients. 

Traditionally, these forms have been paper-and-pencil assessments filled out in busy waiting rooms, or answered face to face with a care provider. Both of these methods have their drawbacks: paper forms can be manually intensive to process, while face-to-face check-ins may suffer from reporting bias due to patients withholding information about their symptoms.

Digital assessment flows like Formsort’s help ease the administrative burden of mental health assessments, and make it easier to monitor patients’ symptoms over time.

Assessment templates that meet industry standards

The patient health questionnaire (PHQ) is a self-administered version of the Primary Care Evaluation of Mental Disorders (PRIME-MD) diagnostic instrument for common mental health illnesses originally developed in the 1990s. It incorporates DSM-IV depression criteria with other leading major depressive symptoms. The PHQ-9 is a 9-item questionnaire for depressive disorders, the PHQ-4 is a 4-item questionnaire for anxiety and depression, and the GAD-7 is a 7-item questionnaire for anxiety.  

These questionnaires were a great place for us to start our template products. Why? 

Questions are standard throughout the medical industry, so a wide range of health care providers can use them. 

Building this flow from scratch can be tedious and time-consuming to do yourself. You'll need to configure the flow design and build the complex calculation logic to score respondents appropriately. A ready-to-use template includes questions, a design theme and calculation logic out of the box, saving you time and money.

Since assessment questions are standardized, your team can focus your time on customizing the style to ensure the flow aligns with your brand’s design. 

Here’s what one of our customers, Allara Health, has to say about our templates:

“At Allara, we know women with PCOS have a 5x higher rate of anxiety and/or depression, so it's important that we check in on patients’ mental health through GAD-7 and PHQ-4 scores over time. Formsort’s clinically validated templates make it easy to collect this information, and free up time so our team can focus more on care delivery (e.g. staying informed about patients' mental health and helping them feel healthier overall).”

How do Formsort’s mental health intake templates work?

Each of the 3 templates is designed as a 1-page questionnaire. Keeping it to 1 page makes it easy for responders to complete the flow, but you can choose to break out the questions across multiple pages. 

Each of the 3 templates have 2 versions: one that displays answer choices with sliders, and one that displays answer choices with buttons. Teams can choose the style that best fits their desired user experience. In general we are seeing companies shift to buttons over sliders, but the sliders’ left to right motion is intuitive and in-line with the design of paper assessment forms. Below we share a preview of each style.

By default, answer choices for each question are scored on a 0-3 scale, aligning with standard scoring mechanisms for PHQs and GAD-7. You can choose to customize the answer values, but we recommend sticking to the default so your results can be analyzed and compared to national statistics.

Once responders complete the questionnaire, the template generates an assessment score in real-time based on their responses. The assessment score is a preset calculated variable that aggregates scores of individual questions into a composite score aligned to a clinically validated scoring framework. This score helps practitioners understand the severity of a patient’s symptoms over time. 

We recently launched Fineflows, a pattern library featuring live flows for the most common use cases, like mental health intake templates. You can use this free gallery as inspiration when designing your next flow. Here's a mental health assessment flow by Hims that we like:

If you’re interested in learning more about our templates and how to get started, talk to our team.

Build clinically validated flows faster with our new templates

Announcing Formsort's mental health assessment templates

Why testing is an essential part of form building

Recently, I was stuck on an online form that wouldn’t let me continue because required fields were missing. However, there was no indication what the missing fields were. I could've abandoned the form, but as a form building engineer, I was professionally curious. 

Turns out, the missing fields were tucked away under some toggles that had pre-populated fields. I could only find out these fields were required and not pre-populated through trial and error. I clicked on one of the toggles and finally saw the missing required fields. Basic form testing would have detected this UX issue and helped the web developer build a better flow. 

A broken form can lead to customer frustration and missed opportunities. Testing forms helps you catch common form errors, but this can often be overlooked in the rush to publish. Below I share some form testing best practices you can include in your form development and maintenance processes. 

General testing principles applied to form testing 

Flows require testing on all levels of the testing pyramid, with unit and integration tests at the backend and end to end tests at the frontend. Formsort performs unit tests, integration tests and integration monitoring. You conduct the frontend UI test testing pyramids on the  flows as you build, before you launch, anytime you make changes, and periodically to catch unexpected bugs. Your tests are called end-to-end (E2E) because even though they are UI tests, they are dependent on all levels of the application (backend to frontend) working correctly. 

A simple linear form can be easy to test, but when your flow has branches with conditionals and redirects, the potential for frontend development errors increases.For example, if a question has 3 possible answers, each redirecting to a different page, you need to test each answer and redirect. If each of those pages has 2 possible redirects, that’s a total of 6 flow paths for just 2 questions you need to test. Things can get complicated real fast when you’re building a form! That’s why it’s important to have a systematic approach and follow best practices while form testing.

Form fields seem straightforward in theory but open your form up to a lot of potential for user error. Suppose, for example, you have a height picker, but the customer puts in nothing (if allowed), or just zero.

Fields where you collect data are prime areas for misunderstanding, and should be tested with the assumption that you will get invalid inputs. Here are some common ways to mitigate invalid inputs:

Set up form validation. This ensures that data inputs fall within a required format and range. If an input falls outside of the requirements, you can render an error message so that responders try again. 
Formsort lets you validate common fields like phone number, email addresses, and dates. For example, we offer auto-correction of common email domain typos (@gmail.con gets suggested to @gmail.com). 


Add tooltips to provide further guidance to the responder. Tooltips are 1-2 sentence descriptors that help the responder understand what information the form field is requesting. They help contextualize the field for your responder, without setting explicit input ranges like form validation. Formsort lets you add tooltips on any question of interest.

With great power comes great responsibility. Features like conditional logic and calculated variables help you personalize your flow, but they also create potential points of failure. 

Conditional logic allows you to funnel responders into unique paths depending on their response to one or multiple questions. Let’s say you have a question about a responder’s favorite color, and later on you have different questions depending on that answer. If the responder answers with a non-color, or a color you don’t set up a path for, what will happen? You can avoid this fate by ensuring that all paths can be achieved with the answer set, and all answer sets have a path.

Calculated variables allow you to define new answers based on other answers present within the flow. For example, a flow might calculate a score for a mental health assessment based on the end user’s responses to questions. Test out any calculated variables in quizzes by entering valid and invalid data. Is the result what you expected based on your quiz setup? Are you rendering error messages when applicable? These details can have a significant UX impact.

Test redirects, especially those including any variables in the query parameters. Enter some bad data, try to go back. Test your published flow in incognito mode, or your browser's equivalent. 

Use a staging environment, which is a near copy of the production environment, to test the retrieval of submission data, including where your flow will send data, the shape of submission data, and the frequency with which data is sent. 

Be sure to test any endpoints that will be accessed by your flow via API.  Common use cases of this include looking up answers from a server, or populating answer choices via API. At Formsort we refer to these as “API variables”. When set up correctly, they make it significantly faster for responders to complete a flow.  However, incorrect endpoint setup can actually slow down the form filling process and cause frustration for the responder.

For example, if you’ve set up API variables to lookup users’ account IDs based on their email addresses but entered an incorrect URL, failure to fetch the account ID may block progress in the flow completion. 

If you’re using the populate dynamic choices to display the most updated list of medical providers in a dropdown field, it is essential to fetch the data from the API correctly. Otherwise, users might not see any options to choose from and be prevented from proceeding with the form.

Integrations must be tested to ensure all the subsystems you’ve connected to your flow are working to perform their respective tasks. Test all of your enabled integrations across environments: staging, if it’s enabled, production and any other custom environments you set up. The primary test here is to make sure the data is received by the integration.

For BigQuery, Redshift and Webhooks integrations, make sure you set the appropriate submission frequency (every step, debounced, on savepoint, or upon finalization).

Confirm that the schema in your BigQuery account is configured correctly. Set Allowed webhooks domains, if you’re integrating with Webhooks.

For analytics integrations, configure the events. And remember to re-deploy flows anytime you update your integrations.

Does your form design account for different devices, browsers, and operating systems?

Prospective customers will access your flows from desktops and mobile devices. With over 70% of internet users on smartphones and tablets, your flows must be designed for multiple screen sizes (source). Test your flow by shrinking and expanding your web browser window. You can easily do this by opening up devtools and choosing the device toolbar for different emulators. Then, test it vertically and horizontally on smartphones and tablets.

Different browsers (Chrome, Safari), input methods (keyboard, mouse, touchscreen), and operating systems(Macs, Windows) will also handle your design differently. Your flow needs to be as accessible on an older desktop operating system as it is on the latest smartphone touch screen so make sure to test, test, and test some more.  

There are many tools that help you test for responsive design. BrowserStack lets you test open source projects across different browsers, devices and operating systems.

This is an ‘it depends’ answer. How long can the form not be working before you care? At Formsort, we have tests that run every 5 minutes on critical pages like our homepage. If our home page is down, we care right away. In other instances, like our beta site, we may want a test every hour.

Are there any tools that help with ongoing form maintenance?

If the form is sticking around (not just used for a one-off test ), consider adding automated tests. There are tools that can be used to go through a form flow and verify it gets to the end. Some common ones include selenium, cypress and playwright. They can test branching logic, and some of them can test integration/endpoint calls. Contact us for more details.

How does Formsort help engineers with form testing? 

Take advantage of our staging environment or make your own custom environment for testing

Go through our preflight testing checklist before your form goes live. This is a more comprehensive list of things to test before you ship.

As mentioned earlier, Formsort conducts integration and unit tests on the backend so that you can focus on testing frontend form features. We also have our own testing and monitoring (for example, of your integrations). On the testing side, Formsort uses cypress and playwright to test the E2E functionality we provide within the Formsort studio. 

On the monitoring side, we have frequent monitoring of our services to make sure we can report to our customers immediately if something is down. We monitor our client's integrations to make sure that the integrations are working properly. We monitor our running code for unusual errors. 

Chat with our team to start your form building journey, or check out our docs.

Stop losing leads due to broken forms

Announcing Formsort’s new user interface (UI) library

A seamless user experience is just as essential for our customers (you) as it is for your end users. That’s why we’ve redesigned our set of existing UI components to make your form building process as intuitive as possible.

Up until this point, our team at Formsort has been utilizing the rich collection of Material UI components with some level of customization. As a primer, Material UI components are React-based design components in the Material library that are specifically created for web developers to use when designing their websites. They form the foundation of a website’s design – from colors and fonts to icons and shapes – and reduce the need for everyone having to create them from scratch.  

As we've grown as a business, our studio has created UI interactions that are so specialized that relying on off-the-shelf components could result in a suboptimal user experience. As a result, we've spent the last few months redesigning our UI library, building on top of the existing Material UI components and creating new ones.

Getting these interactions right and having them as reusable components ensures that our customers have a pleasant and consistent experience when building flows. It also speeds up your design and implementation process. For example, now when you choose a background color, you will see the color hex code and a bigger color swatch. 

Our goal is to develop a robust design system to optimize your flow building experience. We’ve started with the most urgent UX areas identified internally and by our customers, including interactions related to:

Improving our color picker tool. Inconsistent colors can leave a poor first impression with customers. We’ve updated our color picker tool's interface to make it easier to choose and display your color of choice. 


Standardizing the display of optional properties. Editing the content and style of forms can get quite complex. To make this a less overwhelming experience, we are only showing options and properties when relevant. For example, we’ve standardized how we display and group optional properties using a component we call the Toggle accordion. Now, you will always see which option will trigger and enable more options. You will also find it easier to understand the relationship between them.


Since we already had a working version of our UI library, our redesign process started with looking at what we have today and creating a series of components to improve the flow building UX. We followed the atomic design approach: first we defined our most basic building blocks (e.g. colors, fonts, shapes are atoms) molecules (e.g. dropdown lists) and finally organisms (e.g. dialogs). Building up from a repertoire of high-quality standalone, portable, reusable building blocks ensures that end customers’ flow building experience is consistent and intuitive.

Even small details like alignment, wording, fonts, and scale can have a large impact on the flow building experience. Our UI library components are created with accessibility in mind e.g. taking into account color contrast, text legibility and non-mouse interactions (like keyboard interactions).  

We aim to keep our library minimal and responsive to user needs. We are not creating components just for the sake of having them. We are optimizing our resource allocation by only developing the highest-impact components. 

Exploring and creating the components proved to be a great opportunity to review how Formsort works on the interaction level. When doing the exploration work on a new or existing component, we meticulously look at all the places in Formsort Studio where such an interaction takes place. We discuss all the use-cases and edge-cases, making sure we create solutions that cover everything and are future-proof. We aim to create components that can potentially combine existing, similar patterns: when similar functionality is presented with different interactions across the UI, it's a good chance for us to come up with a single solution. The resulting consistency makes the lives of our users easier and saves future implementation and design resources for us.

Our engineering and design teams work closely to make sure we get everything right e.g. from the technical and accessibility perspectives. We continue to use Material UI as a base for our components with a rich customization. As new components become available in the UI library, we phase out and replace all the old instances across the Formsort Studio interface.  We use Figma for exploration and design, Storybook to showcase and document the components that are ready, and Chromatic to detect visual regression. 

At this point, around 80% of everything you see in the Studio has been updated with new UI library components. Changes range from the most basic building blocks like buttons and checkboxes to more specific interactive elements like a color picker or an image uploader. 

We’re still in the beginning phases of our UI library. Its expansion and maintenance will be an ongoing journey. Eventually, it will evolve into a well-rounded design system that covers a lot more than the atoms, molecules and organisms we have today. As we continue building the UI library, look out for more updates! 

Learn more about our ongoing improvements and how Formsort can build better forms for you. 

Optimizing your form building experience with our new UI library

If you're on AWS, this article will show you an easy way to set up an authenticated webhook target that can scale using Lambda function URLs. While they don't provide nearly the breadth of the features that come with API Gateway, function URLs are simple and trivial to roll out. Used in conjunction with Formsort's signed webhook requests, we can also make them secure.

We'll primarily build out the code for our Lambda handler in this post, but you'll find everything you need to quickly deploy this using the AWS Serverless Application Model in this project. While we use Python, all of this can be ported to the Lambda runtime of your choice.

We chose to have our Lambda publish to an SQS queue for this because they are simple and scaleable consumption targets for other parts of your system. This makes them a great way to get started, because your initial bottleneck will be concurrent Lambda invocations. Default concurrency as of the time of this writing is 1000 invocations per account per region! This gives you great throughput capabilities for inbound answers very early on and can subsequently be increased through a support request with AWS.

As a reminder, here are the parts of the event generated from a Lambda function URL that we care about that will be passed to your handler:

{
    "headers": {
        "x-formsort-signature": "fooXvb2luxtOgquxGbazmpYFsvu_VOduxqlEwN0Wbar",
    },
    "body": "{\\"answers\\": {\\"confirm\\": true}, \\"responder_uuid\\": \\"xxxxxxx-2009-4151-a206-80f2739ec3ec\\", \\"variant_label\\": \\"main\\", \\"variant_uuid\\": \\"xxxxxxxxx-82c2-4d94-9e53-1f4c918be198\\", \\"finalized\\": true}"
}


import boto3
import os

SQS_QUEUE_URL = os.getenv("SQS_QUEUE_URL")

def handler(event, context):

    # Send Message to Queue
    sqs = boto3.resource("sqs")
    answers_queue = sqs.Queue(SQS_QUEUE_URL)
    answers_queue.send_message(MessageBody=event["body"])
    return {
        "statusCode": 200,
        "body": "success"
    }


You can easily use this code snippet creating a Lambda function in the console. If you're doing this from scratch, you'll also want to setup an SQS queue and use that Queue URL in the above SQS_QUEUE_URL environment variable. The referenced project in the introduction will provision this queue for you automatically using CloudFormation and expose it as an export.

"Sort" of a blog

Introducing Formsort's open access

Balance Homes optimizes their fintech signup flow with Formsort

Introducing our Google Sheets integration

Announcing Formsort’s SOC 2 Type II certification

Allara more than doubles conversion rates using Formsort

Announcing Formsort's mental health assessment templates

Form testing guide for engineers

Introducing Formsort’s UI Library

Creating secure, serverless webhook targets on AWS

Optimizing your sign-up flow: tips from a product manager

How Vial increased clinical trial sign-ups by 30%

Scaling with Formsort

Leveraging partial form responses

Running untrusted code safely in browsers

How Form Health saved thousands of engineering hours with Formsort

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