This is a pretty exciting week in the office. We invited several people to help us test the latest version of JotForm. It was eye opening to see how people behave on these tests. We have always done quick “what do you think about this site” or “what do you think about this feature” kind of tests with other people and since we always get feedback emails from people we thought we understood how other people use our web application. How wrong we were!
Phishing is a big problem. There are literally gangs which employ people in Nigeria to create phishing forms all day long. We know it because we are on the front lines. Our phishing filters suspend hundreds of phishers every month.
Since we are working very hard to make creating web forms easier, as an unfortunate side effect, phishers also prefer JotForm to create their forms. I am not sure if we should be flattered about this. 
What I am sure is that we have to fight hard to stop phishers, just like PayPal had to fight fraud hard to become one true Internet payment service.
We were fighting a losing war until couple of years ago. We had to manually review all suspicious forms. It was incredibly time consuming and phishers were creating new forms faster than we can delete them. So, we came up with a breakthrough idea. We implemented a Bayesian filter that detects and suspends phishing forms. Basically, we were using statistics to determine if a given form is doing phishing or not. It worked amazingly well. Whatever new ideas phishers came up with, our Bayesian filter quickly learned and adapted.
We have huge amount of data on phisher behavior; types of forms they create, commonly used words, types of tactics they use, where they come from etc. If you are a researcher or a student working on a thesis, feel free to contact me and I can provide you lots of data to play with.
How do you monetize a web application or a web site? What kind of business model makes long term success more likely? These topics are being discussed to death on many web business discussion boards. There are mainly two camps of thought: Cripple the product or provide 30-day trial period then disable it unless user buys it. I call them crippleware and trialware. I don’t like any of these approaches. I believe the best strategy is to only charge users when they are successful.
Like every successful relationship, business and customers need to meet in a middle ground. Both sides must be happy. If one side thinks they are being screwed, they will not like it and will probably leave at the first opportunity. Crippled products or trial versions are bad because one side on the relationship knows that the other side is only in it for the money and does not care about them. You can use these approaches successfully and probably can make more money in the short term, but you will also limit growth of the product.
If you limit the users too early, they will have to stop using the service before they reach to a critical point where they can completely learn and utilize your service. What do you think?
Lean thinking is about eliminating waste. Every web application must have a single main purpose. Everything else should be optimized to make that goal easy to reach. If you look at most of the existing web applications today, there are just so many things that wastes user’s time and energy: (more…)
When I named my blog “Web Applications are the Future” more than 4 years ago, there was a big discussion among software developers on if the web applications can replace desktop applications. Nobody discusses that any more. Probably because web applications have pretty much won. They are getting faster and easier to use every day.
That’s why I decided to rename my blog to “Lean Web Applications”. I’ll be sharing my thoughts on what is a “lean web application” and how to develop them in my future posts. We are developing new version of JotForm with these ideas so I am going to have many thoughts to share on this topic.
Drag and drop is one of the most underused features on web applications. Although there are really cool libraries, we haven’t seen a lot of adoption on this front. Using drag and drop on a web application can make it user friendly. It gives users flexibility to easily place and sort objects which can be very difficult and sometimes ugly to accomplish with buttons or links.
Here is a look at seven of the most creative drag and drop web applications:
We’re very excited to announce that JotForm iPhone App is now available on iPhone App Store!
It is completely Free. Install it today to receive and access your form submissions anywhere! You can …
We have finally completed our JotForm iPhone app and submitted it to Apple for review. Once approved it will be completely free to all JotForm users. I would like to share how we developed the new application with user feedback.
SitePoint has always been one my favorite sites. In 2001, they featured one of my free scripts on their newsletter and pointed thousands of people to download it. It was a big rush to see so many users starting using my product. That’s how I started reading them. Back then, they were a small webmaster site and I’m glad they still kept that feeling of being close to their community.
SitePoint is running a nice article “The Foolproof Form Design Formula”. It is actually a chapters from their new book Fancy Form Design. The article suggests defining user personas for your forms and creating prototypes/wireframes to foolproof your form.
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We have recently switched to a new hardware architecture for our JotForm form builder service. I am pretty pleased with it because we were able to do it without any downtime or any problems for our users. As a result of this switch, JotForm now has much better high availability, speed and security. It was also a lot of fun to do it.
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Being a home seller in this economy must be pretty tough. There is help now! HomeSeller Software has just been released. Its goal is to provide home owners with all of the tools, knowledge and feedback necessary to succeed. Best of all, it is completely free.
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DogSearcher is one of coolest sites we have worked on. As a part of our Complete Membership Site Solution we provided design and development services. Dog Searcher is a community site for dog owners. Users can discuss various dog related topics on the forum, make posts on their blog, create profiles for their dogs and even sell their puppies to other dog lovers. This site is also very rich in content. There are many useful articles about taking care of dogs. They have even started using the new Memberkit Answers application to create a Q&A section on the site.
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For a growing startup, customer support is one of the most important things. You need to be talking to them to:
We receive many support emails every day. We also have multiple people responsible for our products. That’s why I researched a lot about the helpdesk solutions and found out that they are too complex, confusing and difficult to maintain. Instead we have been using Gmail for many years and it worked well for us.
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Today, I was surprised to discover that I already have 74 Google Docs documents and pretty much stopped using Microsoft Office for the last year. It certainly did not happen intentionally. I think I’ve first started using Google Docs in 2006. I have been using more and more Google Docs since then. Today I have no need for Microsoft Office and I am surprisingly pretty happy about it.
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I am always fascinated with good writing. Maybe because it has many things in common with good software. A good user interface just flows. It is invisible. You get the task done without confusion. It might even be fun. Good writing has that quality as well. It captures the reader’s attention. Writing becomes invisible and the story becomes the reality. Both good writing and good software flows with the user. They provide a sense of accomplishment.
When I was in school, it took me all weekend to write a paper with couple of pages. Some people could write that in an hour. It was tough for me. Especially since English was my second language. But here is the interesting part. I always liked writing. It was tough but I enjoyed it a lot. I enjoyed every minute of it. My ideas were probably not that great. My writing was pretty bad. But it felt great to put things on paper.
In software, you start with a zero byte file. It is like an empty sheet of paper. Then you put things on it. Sometimes work on it for months. You get ideas and put them there. Instead of words, you code the ideas. Suddenly those ideas become reality for the user. If you are lucky, millions of people might even run the code you created.
A good writing is usually simple. Short sentences are good. Being to the point is good. Same applies to software. It is very hard work to make a user interfaces simple. The first draft you create is usually a very complex peace of mess. Then you work on it and refine it. You Keep it Simple, Stupid. KISS principle applies both to writing and software.
[Some thoughts I have had while reading a book called "On Writing Well" by Williaam Zinsser.]
We have just started using DropBox here at Interlogy offices and we are really excited about it. The Mac application works like a charm but they also support Windows and Linux versions.
Basically you have Dropbox folder on your computer and whatever you put there, it also shows up on other users you are sharing the folder with. It is fast and easy to use. We will probably start using it instead of email attachments. Since you can also send comments using the tool.
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We have introduced a new product called “Full Membership Site Solution” last month and I am quite impressed with the amount of interest it received. We develop membership software that power thousands of web sites. So, we have been regularly receiving requests from our clients to not only provide the software but also to develop whole site for them.
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It is amazing how time passes by so quickly. It has been almost 8 years since the first version of Profile Manager Premium came out. At that time, I was still a computer science student. It all started with some free web site development I was doing for a non-profit organization. I was only doing it for fun but I also believed in the organization. I shared the scripts I developed on the web. Which lead to some small consulting gigs which lead me to post some more free scripts on the web. Two of the scripts I posted in 1999 became pretty popular among small websites. One was called “Netcard” and the other one was “Profile Manager”. They were both simple scripts which made it possible for small sites to easily let visitors create profiles on their sites. There was no term called “social networking” at that time. The biggest profile site was “Yahoo! Profiles” so most of the users wanted something similar to that.
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When we design software our goal is to make complex things easy for webmasters. So, we have to constantly think about the user interface. We sometimes redesign same functionality many times until we find a way that is easy to use but still flexible.
Today, we had another breakthrough idea on the new product we are working on. I define a breakthrough idea as one that make you say “how in the world I didn’t think of that before”. They are simple and elegant solutions to seemingly complex problems. Before we come up with an idea like that, we usually have a big mess. We are stuck and cannot find a good way out. We are almost ready to assume that there are no good solutions. We have thought of everything but the ideas we have are at best acceptable. They are not great. We don’t get excited when we think about implementing them. I think this is an important point. If we are not excited about what we are doing, we are probably doing it wrong.
Aytekin Tank is cofounder of Interlogy Internet Technologies. The company that created the popular JotForm web form builder. Developing web applications is his passion.
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