Form Designer - UX Improvements

Feature Requests
1

After trying a few different form builders, I ended up using Feathery because it was the one offering the most flexibility and control while still being rather easy to use. So good job for that and thank you :clap:

I spent a bit of time creating a larger form and here are a few irritating things in terms of experience I came across while doing it:

THEME & CUSTOM ELEMENTS
Creating a custom element (e.g. a variant of text) from the designer works well, but if you want to update the element, not everything will be actually saved. You have to edit the theme directly to do so.
For example:

  1. add a text element in your form
  2. change the text to something like “a beautiful text”
  3. adjust your styles
  4. create a custom component from that text element
  5. now everytime you use that component it will by default use the “a beautiful text”
  6. change the text to “Field description”
  7. click the “update element” button
  8. it doesn’t actually update it, you need to open the theme and change it there

SELECT MULTIPLE ELEMENTS
Currently not possible at all to select multiple elements in the designer to edit them at once (e.g. make multiple text elements bold or move them around).

MOVE A WHOLE CONTAINER
Let’s say I have a container with some elements in it. It is very hard to target the container in order to move it around (click + drag + drop). I instinctively tried to drag and drop the “label” of that container (that is displayed when selecting the container), but it doesn’t do anything.

REPEATING CONTAINERS AND THEIR ELEMENTS
Having to manually check “repeatable” for every elements inside a “repeatable container” is cumbersome. Especially because it will trigger an error forcing you do so and discarding all your recent changes.
For example:

  1. create a container
  2. mark that container repeatable
  3. add an element (e.g. text field) inside that container
  4. notice no errors nor warnings
  5. change a property/style of the element you added on step (3)
  6. notice an error saying the element should be repeatable as well
  7. make the element repeatable
  8. notice that you lost your changes from step (5)

SOME ERRORS WILL MAKE YOU LOOSE YOUR CHANGES
As stated right before, it’s not the only case where you could come across an error and realize all your changes will be lost. Another case I noticed is the following:

  1. create a whole step with a repeatable container in it and a button to trigger “add a new repeatable element” pointing to that container
  2. duplicate the whole step
  3. make some changes
  4. notice an error stating that your trigger must point to a valid repeatable element
  5. enjoy your changes being lost

In that case, this error seems to be trigger because when you duplicate a step, it will generate new containers ID, but it will not properly set them in your trigger, so your trigger becomes invalid.

INABILITY TO GROUP 2 ELEMENTS TOGETHER
It’s a bit related to the fact that you cannot select multiple elements thus cannot group them together to put them in a common container. If you want to do so, you have to create the container, drag the first element in the container and then try to drag the second element as well. It insist on try to drag it because it might not work or it will be difficult to do so.

MOVE UP/DOWN OPTIONS IN A DROPDOWN/CHECKBOX GROUP/RADIO GROUP
Though it is possible, it is quite awkward for very long dropdown list to reorder them. Let’s say I have 20 elements, I add a new element, this element will be placed last. I want to move that element in position 3. I will have to click “…” dots and move up many times.

CONTAINERS & THEME
I couldn’t find a way to have a container that is styled (width, padding, etc.) in the theme so I can easily reuse it and update it everywhere in one go.

CREATING A NEW ASSET FROM ANY OTHER ELEMENTS
It doesn’t always seem possible to create a new asset from an existing element. For example: add a new “secondary” button, customize it as you want. Now you cannot create a new asset out of it, all you have is “update asset”.

CREATING A NEW ASSET FROM THE DESIGNER
Apparently, we can create assets only from the designer, then if we want to update them, it’s better to open the theme and to it there. It would be nice to be able to create a new asset directly from the theme instead of having to open the designer to do so.

REFERRING TO ASSETS VS ELEMENTS
Sometimes we see “assets”, sometimes we see “elements”. The usage of the 2 terms is confusing and seems to refer to the same thing.

And I think it’s all I noted for now… Thank you!

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