Document Editor

A web application that allows designing, layouting, and generating digital forms using drag and drop. No need for tedious-to-fill-out paper forms anymore.

Challenge

Many companies still deal with a lot of paperwork. And it's not just informational material. Large paper forms are used as surveys or questionnaires. There are already form builders out there, but many of those lack a well-structured format to build upon. So when Dampsoft asked me to develop a tool that would allow dentists to design their own digital anamnesis documents, I knew that was a great challenge.

Solution

I created a document editor that allows to create complex form documents in just minutes. It features drag and drop to arrange text and images. Form elements can be configured to capture user input. Single-choice and multiple-choice elements allow conditional nesting. Nested elements are only shown, once a particular answer has been selected, which allows for interactivity when someone fills out the form. The editor supports multiple languages and creates a well-structured JSON description of the whole document in the end. That means the document can be rendered to HTML and PDF, or be displayed inside a native tablet app. Hear two dentists (German) talking about using the editor for handling their digital anamnesis forms.

My role

The document editor was a great project and Dampsoft was an excellent client. I developed the app from scratch using React / Redux, embedded in a Rails app. After just 10 days, the first few people on the team started to create documents. Soon, through continuous feedback loops, I was able to iterate quickly and to improve design, browser compatibility and performance. There was even time for me to write end-to-end-tests with cypress.