Using JsonForms

By Angus Cheng

In a previous post I set some goals for the following week. Let’s see how that went.

✅ Pressure friends to fill out a form

This was easy, I messaged a bunch of friends on Facebook and asked them to fill out the form. They did and it mostly worked. I noticed a few errors doing this. Easy peasy.

❌ Buy Facebook Ads

I didn’t do this. My Facebook Advertising account was banned for past indiscretions. Apparently I can set up a business account on Facebook and run ads again. I guess I should try that.

✅ Buy Reddit Ads

This was surprisingly easy. It took me about fifteen minutes to start running ads. Check out these annoying comments from the know-it-alls at Reddit.

I spent $275 USD on ads, which got me 1673 clicks. Of those clicks, zero people finished filling in the form. Very annoying. Here’s some theories why

  1. The users don’t really care about moving their license over
  2. The form/website looks too plain and therefore untrustworthy
  3. They got tired filling in the form and dropped off halfway through

Issue #1 can be dealt with by creating other forms. If I built 100 forms, surely some of them will be critical.

Issue #2 can be dealt with by polishing the design and creating a nice landing page.

Issue #3 can be verified by putting in more analytics. If there really is drop off then perhaps some tricks can be done to increase form completion.

For whatever reason, the ads are not converting. I dropped the daily budget from $50 to $20.

❌ Finish the Certificate of No Criminal Conviction Form

The UI is finished, but I haven’t finished the backend. I reckon it requires another three hours of work. Sorry!

✅ Try out JsonForms

I had a play around with JsonForms, it seems to make a lot of sense so I decided to build Form 172A using JsonForms. I didn’t like the way the default forms looked, so I spent a bunch of time customizing the inputs.

They also do not support file uploads and signatures. So I built extensions for those as well. It does seem to be the way to go so going forward all future forms will be built using JsonForms.

❌ Eat Dog Food

I didn’t explain what this meant in my previous blog post. It means I should fill TD63A, submit it to the government and get my Australian driving license converted.

I didn’t do this, partially because I don’t have a printer and partially because I’m lazy as hell.

This Week’s Goals

I’m only going to set two, because I’ll be in Vietnam on holiday from Wednesday to Sunday. Basically I have today and tomorrow to get these done.

  1. Eat Dog Food
  2. Finish the Certificate of No Criminal Conviction Form