Stop wasting your business's time and money coding bespoke web-forms

Configure instead, its much cheaper.

From the genus that is “Wardley Mapping”, move from custom building to off the shelf configuration.

For customer interaction, instead of re-creating the wheel over and over again, get the talent you employ can do creative things to differentiate you from the competition.

One way to solve this problem, use SurveyJS and Node-Red a perfect match to create workflow pipelines. You can even turbo charge into the 21st century with AI agents.

Its all about knowing the difference of what to build and what to buy.

Here is a video explanation of Wardley mapping.

Here is a free book to read

When you need to gather data from you customers, SurveyJS offers an inexpensive and very configurable way of creating forms.

You will probably need some experience to get your first form to have your cooperate look and feel, but after that, creating forms to extract data becomes very simple. The project owners can create forms, leaving the developers to do more creative and profitable work.

But wait, what about security, what if people send in bad data, or even worse try to send hacks.

That’s where a “DMZ” demilitarized-zone comes in. Just because someone fills in a form and gives you data, you don’t have to act on it. You just store it; SurveyJS handles that for you.

It’s a two stage process, the next step is where your business looks at the data, and decides how to ingest it into the organisation as information. Don’t throw anything away, bad data tells you a lot!

Now you will have a big collection of JSON data. Your business needs a way to decide on if and how that data impacts your business. For this we need flow-based programming, and the best tool for this is node-red.

With this tool, use your expensive developers to implement state-machines, process-journeys and decision logic. These are the secret sauce that drives your business, differentiates you and enables your key-success factors. Most of these developers have “brains the size of a planet” don’t Marvin the robot them on CSS hacks to move text boxes around.

You don’t have to spend the same design effort on internal systems as you do on external facing websites. But they must be usable and not hurt the eye. There is a tool for that.

This tool gives you everything you need to make good looking internal systems. Much of the ground work has been done. It’s Vue based not React or Angular, but that’s not a problem for any good developer, I jump between all three for the commercial development I do.

If you want to go big, it’s worth checking out flow-fuse cloud; they have the multi-user, authentication and SSO thing covered. They focus a lot on industrial automation, but the same tool is just as usable in general business situations.

I don’t work for, get paid by or get any freebies from any of the companies listed above. A lot of their products are free and open source.

However I find getting this advice implemented in an organisation can be an uphill struggle. This might be due to commercial inertia of the front end teams and often their bespoke component libraries. It also might be complex back-ends that are to entrenched or have had so much money spent on them, that are closed to change in the minds of the teams that manage this area of a business.

I don’t want this advice to go to waste, so if you are a manager check out Wardley maps and see what it can do for your business.

If your are a developer, check out SurveyJS as a brilliant form builder and have a look at the concept of flow-programming with node-red.

Thanks for reading.