We’ve built a brand new, more powerful, and more flexible form engine. Here are the details.
Submittable’s flagship easy-to-use drag and drop form builder is a big reason our customers love us. But it’s been a long time since our company was first founded—10 years as of 2020, in fact—and over time, we realized our form engine needed an overhaul in order to improve performance and keep up with our growing company, as well as bring new functionality to our customers.
It’s been months of hard work for our product development team, but we’re proud to announce that the new and improved form engine is here! New customers will start on the new form engine immediately, and we’ll be working to migrate existing customers to the new system soon.
What is the new form engine?
The new form engine can be easily recognized by the attractive, re-designed form field menu, now located on the left side of the screen.
We’ve updated the names of several form fields, as well as introduced new fields, to make building a form easier and faster than ever. On the backend, the new form engine is more efficient and more powerful, helping pave the way for lots of exciting new features to release to our customers, and more quickly, in the future.
The image above is of the new Initial Form, but the new form engine is, or will soon be, available across our platform (with slightly different capabilities in some instances), including Additional Forms and Review Forms.
What new tools does the new form engine provide?
The new form engine makes building a form simpler and more intuitive than ever, including these specific benefits:
- Preview: It’s now easier than ever to preview your form as you build with a one-click Preview shortcut. Use Preview to be sure you’ve marked all necessary fields as required, that you’ve included sufficient instructions, and that your form logic is working the way that you want it to.
- Projects: Calls for submissions or applications now live in a Project, to which you add an Initial Form (as well as Additional Forms or Review Forms, when applicable). Projects include general settings, assignments, and your review process, and now exist completely separately from your forms. This means that you can save time by reusing a form as many times as you like, even for opportunities that may have different parameters or workflows.
- New Form Fields: The new form engine introduces the following new form fields, ready for you to drag and drop or double-click to populate directly into your form—again, saving you time:
- Name
- Address
- Number
- Date
- Updated Features: The new form engine is able to support exciting new features already available, including:
- Custom auto-labels, so you can apply an internal term or shorthand to your auto-labels, rather than using the option displayed to the applicant; and
- Custom branching, so you can give the branches that you create in form logic a name or label for improved usability.
- Reference Forms: You can now request a reference and link to a custom Reference Form right from the initial form, saving the hassle of asking later for both you and the applicant.
How will the new form engine help me and my team?
There are loads of benefits to this exciting update, including:
- Faster form building: The majority of these new features, from the ability to preview and reuse your form to the new field options you can simply drag and drop into your form, are designed specifically to save you time.
- Easier to use: The improved design makes Submittable an even more intuitive platform, simple to use even for the less-than-tech-savvy among us.
- More customizable: The new custom-auto label and custom-branching options make your Submittable account more tailored to your organization.
- Improved performance: Our backend updates have prepared us to remain an extremely reliable solution as we continue growing into the future.
- More new features: The new form engine is better capable of supporting the myriad new form-building features that we have in our pipeline (which will be coming to you soon!).
How do I get the new form engine?
Contact our sales team at sales@submittable.com to start using Submittable’s new form engine today.
Are you an existing customer? If so, we’ll be moving you to the new form engine soon. Contact account management with any questions.
Also new at Submittable
It was quite a year for us! Find out what we achieved together by reading our 2019 Year in Review. Or, check out our Q4 2019 Product Roundup for a peak at how to use some of 2019’s most exciting new features, such as Funds and Review Workflow, as well as a sneak preview of some of what’s to come in 2020. And be sure to stay tuned to the Updates section of this blog for the latest as those features and more are released.
Natalya is a product marketer at Submittable focused on helping organizations get a ton of value out of the platform. She is a bookworm, adventure enthusiast and card-carrying cat lady as well as a writer and yogi.