New form experience beta

All customers will soon benefit from a more intuitive, modern form experience. We’ve started enabling our new form designer for select customers. Read more about the feature and how to get involved below.

Over the last few years, we’ve released updated dashboards, table reports, charts, and new ways to build reports. Our journey to improve the Quickbase user interface continues with a reimagined form experience aimed to increase productivity for both app builders and their users. 

With the new version of forms, you can accelerate the app development process with a drag and drop, WYSIWYG form builder to help your team, see, connect, and control their most complex work. 

We’ll be enabling this feature in waves as we learn about your experience and gather feedback that will inform our roadmap on the way to General Availability later this year. Customers can join the wait-list by registering in this app.

What’s new

We want to empower you with the tools you need to make your apps and businesses successful. Though we've retained many of the features that Quickbase users love, our primary focus was on innovating for the future. You'll notice familiar and new patterns in our form designer. While you may not see every setting, toggle, or switch that you've grown accustomed to over the past two decades, we believe that we've incorporated the best of them into this new world. We’re excited to see what you create!

Drag-and-drop building

We believe that it’s important for you to view your forms from an end-user perspective during the building process. So, we created the drag and drop interface and quick add menu to allow you to see what your form will look like for your end users in real time. You can add elements and rearrange them with immediate results for quicker, more confident form building.

 

Based on customer feedback, we’ve learned that builders want granular control over form layout and element positioning, so we’re introducing more ways to organize elements on the form builder canvas. In addition to pages and sections, builders can now use new columns and groups to separate and structure elements on their forms. 

Adding columns

Use columns to group and arrange similar fields in a visually distinct and easily accessible way to enhance the end-user experience. Column widths are customizable. To shrink or expand a column, hover over the column, click, and drag to your desired width. Add headings and custom color styling to each column, and create form rules to apply specific actions like show, hide, or require all the fields within a column.

Grouping elements

You can group elements together to display them on the same row within a column for improved data entry and visualization experiences. To group elements, drag-and-drop them on top of one another. Once grouped, the fields can be moved as one object on the canvas.

More intuitive ways to add elements to your form

We’ll be improving upon many existing patterns to help builders of all experience levels get the most out of Quickbase. One of the first improvements in this area is adding embedded reports to your form. In addition to adding a report link directly to the form, you can choose to add a Report component and build the matching criteria on the fly.

Better ways to enter data

Displaying pages as steps

We’re giving you new tools to simplify workflows that include complex data entry. When a form has multiple pages, you can customize the navigation experience for your users. Choose Steps from the navigation settings to turn your form into a series of steps that users proceed through as they enter data. Steps can be conditionally shown or hidden using form rules for more control over the end user experience.

Note: while in beta, forms are limited to 10 pages/steps

New pop-up form experience

We want to make entering data into related tables as seamless as possible. To begin, we’ll start with a new in-window option for adding parent records directly from a child. When you click the (+)Create a new record button inside of the record picker, and the two tables both use a new form, a pop-up form will appear over the current record allowing you to create a record in context. This is a pattern we look forward to implementing in other areas of the product in the future.

Improvements to form rules

We’re excited to give our builders an entirely new form rule engine that will help them create sophisticated forms that dynamically change based on their business processes. 
New ways to build conditions

In beta, you can write a boolean formula expression to define a rule’s condition. As we get closer to GA, we’ll release a more intuitive condition builder. 

In both cases, you’ll benefit from the ability to create complex expressions using nested conditions, and  - when using a formula - create conditions that previously required building a separate field in the table to leverage. 

In this example, the builder is showing a set of fields when expense amount plus the current project costs would push the project over budget. 

New action types

Now, you have more options to dynamically change the display of your form. To start, you can update the color of a column to draw a users attention to important fields. Later on, we’ll release new ways to display messages on a form and change the label displayed on a field, column, section, or page.

Simpler, modern UI

To help you create apps your end users love, we’re releasing improvements to our fields to make entering data easier than ever before.

Date picker

Use intuitive controls to find a specific date. Jump between months, years, and decades.

 

Timezone helper

Working across time zones can be a challenge, but we’ve made it simpler to reconcile app time, your local time, and your team's time. Now users can search for a timezone in our timezone helper to automatically fill the correct time.

 

File attachment

Take advantage of a large drop area to drag files directly into Quickbase and upload them to a record.

 
A note on accessibility

Ensuring that all users are able to get their jobs done in Quickbase is an important aspect of the work we do on the product team. We strive to meet WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility standards for end users. You can read more about our approach to accessibility on Quickbase Community.

About Beta

In beta, we’ll be looking for customers willing to partner with us to uncover issues and provide feedback on the overall experience. While in beta, expect to uncover bugs and gaps in functionality. We’ll use this opportunity to learn from our customers what works well and what needs improvement.

Joining the beta

We’ll be activating the feature for customers in waves over the next several months on our way to General Availability. Interested customers can join the wait-list in our beta registration app.

Giving feedback

We’ll be looking for your feedback to help provide direction on where you feel we can improve the new experience. You can log this feedback directly in the form designer by clicking the Give Feedback button in the page bar. Here you can give general feedback, report issues, and submit feature requests. 

 

We can’t wait to see what you build!

What’s next

We’re focused on delivering more features over the next few months, and beyond! Our goal is to create a foundation for customer innovation that will last for the next twenty years. We’ll be using your feedback to help inform us on our way to General Availability. Be on the lookout for news regarding:

• Additional capabilities in our form rules engine, like data changes and the ability to create conditions using a WYSIWYG expression builder.
• Backup and restore of forms
• Copying forms when apps and tables are copied, and allowing users to copy individual forms
• Making changes to new forms in a sandbox
• Adding more step customization options
• Adding multiple embedded reports of any type
• Supporting a table’s auto-save setting
• Showing new form activity in the Field Usage page