About two months ago, at the Geonetric client symposium, we launched the beta version of our new Form Builder. This new tool allows our clients to build their own forms and publish them to their websites. Our goal with Form Builder is to provide clients the ability to easily iterate on their form designs, have more direct control over their interactions with consumers and increase the form-related work they can do on their own.

Throughout the process of building this product we have been living our agile principles: learning about the product through direct client input, continuously improving, and using a combination of qualitative and quantitative feedback to determine the priority of new features and refinements.

Recently, this approach to feedback has helped us with several new features and improvements to existing ones. One example is with the Thank You emails sent by the system when a visitor submits a form. By listening to clients actually using Form Builder to design forms, we learned that they were confused by how the Thank You email address had to be specified in the system. A slight change to the user interface later, and the problem is solved.

And so we’ve continued to iterate and improve Form Builder, putting out several more versions with new features and enhancements. All of which have been driven by conversations with our internal and external clients: users with direct experience using the tool to build and deploy their own forms. We believe this approach helps us build a better product, which further drives adoption and use.

Because understanding how the product is being used is so critical to our work, we’ve recently made an additional investment that will give us new insights. We’ve installed Google Analytics in the Form Builder application. This helps us to answer questions such as:

• What browsers are our clients using with Form Builder?
• At what point in the form building process are users getting stuck?
• What parts of Form Builder aren’t being used at all? Is there any functionality in these sections that are essential and how do we make those parts of the tool more intuitive and user friendly?

But Google Analytics isn’t the only way we can see and understand usage. We have other ways to see Form Builder use and adoption. For example: as of mid-June, 33 Geonetric client organizations have created 76 forms. 29 of these were placed on a website. And these have generated 193 responses. Not bad for a new product still in beta, but it’s encouraging for us to learn what we can do next to make these numbers grow.

Sound familiar? It should. Build-Measure-Learn: it’s exactly the same approach we use when implementing client websites and agile marketing campaigns. In fact, it’s at the very root of Agile and Lean thinking.

Interested in learning more about our new Form Builder? Sign up to receive an invite when our beta program opens again.