That said,
> Partial submissions
> Collect answers from people who filled in a part of your form, but didn’t click the submit button. Capture data from lost leads, find drop off points and improve your conversion rates.
From a user point of view, I really hate this. I’d say collecting data about drop off points is fine, but secretly collecting answers not intended for submission is a dark pattern that violates an implicit social contract and users’ privacy. Hell, people often accidentally paste in private stuff, including passwords.
I can understand that as a form builder product you probably need to offer this feature or lose customers. Add this to the long list of depressing “features” of the modern web.
A few years ago I was the UX lead at a big uk website. At the time, the commercial team were wanting to steal unsubmitted personal data from forms and just couldn’t grasp why it was so wrong.
I’d been fighting them on it for ages, but thankfully a few other large sites got into trouble for doing it and I was able to convince the business that the reputational damage wasn’t worth whatever value we might glean from it. Our users were savvy, privacy conscious and extremely vocal and would have gone mental if it came out we were doing it too.
Couldn’t believe it was even a conversation I needed to have.
I couldn't disagree more. I think the owner of a website should be able to track whatever information they please about your session.
I don't consider the entire thing a form, and at some point I may go "ok, I'm done answering your questions, I don't want to do this anymore", and I leave. I don't assume at that point that nothing has happened. I answered a bunch of questions and gave you the data.
Do other people really look at this UI as if it was a single form, rather than a submit per entry?
I don't understand why you would necessarily think that. The forms can be styled to look like regular forms, with multiple fields per page.
E.g. this registration form: https://tally.so/create?templateId=ywaZnM
I took the above warning as saying that if I type my first name in the first field, then change my mind and go away without submitting anything, then they record my first name.
My actions (leaving after I typed in something, without hitting submit) would in no way look like I intended to submit an entry.
While I think your expectation that there are other forms that do this is possibly valid, I don't think that many other forms I encounter every day do do this, and I would be grossed out if they did.
So either put a big disclaimer yourself at which point no one will probably want to enable it anymore except for edge use cases (which hopefully are ethical even though I can't really think of one right now) or just remove it fully. It's a huge breach of privacy and most customers who have issues with drop rates probably should redesign their form and CTA. Unless the reason for people dropping of is that they're doing something sketchy and/or asking for way too much personal information of course, which is exactly the case where I absolutely do not want to have that data nor would I consent to them collecting it before I click submit.
To say you agree, but it's OK because people pay you for it suggests that you don't really agree.
I used Tally to conduct a survey of my Discord community with 68K members (48K MAU). The creation experience was smooth and the results were easy to parse. The free plan doesn't let me invite my team, but it was easy enough to hook up a Google Sheet they have access to, just like Google Forms.
More recently, I used Tally to create a landing page promoting the upcoming launch of my new website. I added an option to put your name and email to get notified when we launch. I also wanted these people to become the first subscribers to our newsletter, but the site isn't live yet. So, I hooked the form up to a Notion database[1] so I could just export a CSV when the newsletter is ready to go. It was easy, too! In Google Forms this would require writing my own integration with App Script.
I think it's cool that Tally is built by two people who are partners in both work and life. Their story resonated with me, so in addition to (so far) preferring Tally over Google Forms, I would love to support these people. It's not in the budget right now, but I plan to upgrade to Tally Pro and migrate my team very soon.
A note to the creators: I noticed you separated your blog from your help center, and I just wanted to say I really appreciate this change. It's much easier to read now! I love that you picked the Journal theme, too. One of my favorite Ghost themes. Good luck with the business, and keep up the great work!
1: I would have just hooked it up to a Google Sheet again, but since I'm evaluating the product I wanted to test other integrations.
We just finished our help center migration, so happy to hear you like it. :)
I think the UI is great, and love the overall direction of the product.
I know this will be hard to hear, but I want to provide my best feedback.
As a CTO, I will rarely, if ever, use a product like this that's not (at a minimum) open core.
I just can't risk building technical and business momentum around a startup that I don't know the longevity of.
I have no problem paying for software, it's business continuity that I'm concerned with.
For a great example of how to do this, I recommend checking out Mattermost. Also cal.com.
Those are two products I've selected for use in our tech stack.
We are in it for the long haul and I would love to learn how we can make this more clear/explicit - what's the page/message/resource from cal.com, for example, which convinced you of this?
Right on cal.com homepage they call out that they are open source, and they have several places where they link off to their github account.
budibase.com
If you don't have a dedicated designer or are just lacking a unique aesthetic vision then mimicking those who are succeeding isn't a bad move.
Edit: Found it
'usable rich docs interface like notion', 'kitchen sink features in wysiwyg UX', 'solid integrations'
Is there a reason this is hard to add?
It's not particularly difficult to add, but we might have to put the feature behind a paywall as Google Maps' API charges per request. :(
Keep it up!
Will definitely try this for my next form :)
- GIF images in multiple choice question responses - Zapier triggers - Pre-populating form fields that can be overridden by the user?
- Images (+GIFs) in multiple choice questions: https://tally.so/help/customize-your-form#c20941c50a8149abba...
- Zapier integration: https://tally.so/help/zapier-integration
- Pre-populating form fields: https://tally.so/help/pre-populate-form-fields
Can I redirect the form submission to 2 different pages? One for accepted applicants and one for rejected applicants?
Backend: Node, Express, Typescript, Sequelize (MySQL)
Hosting: Google Cloud
Redirect on completion can point to a form field (those include calculated fields). So you can use conditional logic to determine when an application is accepted/rejected and based on that set the redirect URL in a calculated field. Then you can use this calculated field in the Redirect on completion.
You can read more about the above mentions features here:
- Redirect on completion: https://tally.so/help/redirect-on-completion
- Conditional logic: https://tally.so/help/conditional-form-logic
- Calculated fields: https://tally.so/help/form-calculator
How could "anything you type into our forms may be captured" be construed as a clear affirmative action by the person entering data into the form that has a submit button for submitting the data?
Also, to make it unambiguous and informed, it would at least have to be a very-very obvious statement, which would make it useless for the sneaky purposes, wouldn't it?
Edit: I know it's not only GDPR that is being discussed, but I think would follow the same definition.
May use for personal use though, for free.
Collecting personally identifying information without explicit consent seems like a great way to get into trouble. Implied consent is no consent at all.
It's their store. They should be entitled to own everything about you when you walk into their store, right?
When I worked for UK financial company we would track how far people were going through our form wizard to see where the paint points were. The personal information never left the web page, but it would report back telemetry telling us how many people dropped out at each stage. That helped us to do split testing, e.g. does this label make more people fill out the form, etc.
Consider an implementation of "draft" submissions. Imagine you wanted to implement such a feature on top of some form builder. You would require such a feature.
I don't necessarily agree or disagree with the points raised on ethics here, but there's a very real consideration when you're offering a library/package/feature, sometimes you have to expose guts that can be used improperly in order to enable certain featuresets. I think it's obvious why someone building such a tool as OP would offer such a feature as is in discussion, because they would lose money otherwise from implementations that require this feature.
So, if a subset of things that can be done with your work are nefarious, how much effort are you meant to put in to make it ethical to sell your work? Is it inherently always unethical to build a tool which can be used to nefarious ends?
A user knows what a draft is, and would agree to such a feature upon pressing a button that indicates that the draft will be saved for later by submitting the form verbatim as-is to the server
Saving everything a user types in, without a user's informed consent, is a severe trust violation.
Again, OP isn't selling things directly to end-users, so I don't know how the OP is meant to acquire the end user's consent, informed or not. The OP is exposing abilities in a tool which enables his end users to turn around and deliver something to their end users. My question is how culpable OP is for abuse of his tool's abilities, and what level he must go thru to put abuse protections in place to be not morally culpable for his end user's treatment of their end user's, and your answer is "OP needs to get informed consent". Ridiculously simplified.
That's ridiculous. If you provide a whitelabel solution, you simply add consent checkboxes and and explanatory text, the same way shop systems and virtually all other whitelabel software meant to be embedded works.
> how culpable OP is for abuse of his tool's abilities
Regulators don't care where you sourced the software from that you provided. You provide it, you host it, you're culpable.