Reinventing Forms

Every decade there is a new innovation that changes the way we interact with technology. We’ve moved from keyboards to mouses to touch interfaces. With every wave of experience-changing technology, there is a massive opportunity to make things better.

Paul Graham wrote, “In the software business, startups beat established companies by transcending them. Startups don’t build word processing programs to compete with Microsoft Word. They build Writely.”

When you start from scratch, you get to re-imagine how something should be. In Writely’s case, they created a new way to author and edit documents on the Internet. If they wanted to compete with Microsoft head on, they would have started to build Word Art and Tables. Instead, they saw what people needed and that was a better way to work together.

Startups have the opportunity to step back and look at what people expect vs. what people actually need. My co-founder and I believe forms and the tools to make them need to be deconstructed and refashioned for a world with smartphones and tablets.

Why can forms on mobile devices feel more like paper? Why doesn’t a form adapt to a 3.5 inch screen? Or a 8 inch screen? What happens when you are collecting information from 10 mobile devices? 100? 1,000? Can the experience be so easy that it doesn’t require an install? Can good design improve response rates and completion times?

Those are the types of questions we are answering with Funnel.

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