Form Editor
UI & UX Design | Design Lead
Camunda
Forms are where an automated process stops and waits for a person.
The problem
Most automated processes pause somewhere for a human, to enter something or make a decision. A form is that moment.
The editor that built those forms was basic, and teams weren't using it. It couldn't do enough, so people who couldn't code went through engineering for every form and every change. People who could code just built their own by hand. The editor sat in the middle, opened by almost no one.
Build the form and see the real thing at once, with no engineer in the loop
Who the editor is for
Power users were never the target. They hand-code their forms and always will. The editor was for everyone else, the people who can't code or don't want to, and for making forms the system could run instead of custom code bolted on. Success meant getting those people onto the editor.
That set the bar for what to build.
How I prioritised
We had limited capacity and a long list of requests. Every request got checked against real usage, not how good it sounded on paper.
Plenty of things that read well went nowhere because they served one customer, not the many. Capacity went where the most users were.
The keystone: conditional forms
The hardest call was conditional forms, where fields appear and change based on what someone enters. It was complex and slow to build, and it held up other features customers were actively waiting for. We built it anyway.
Without it, a form is single-purpose. With it, one form covers many cases, and every other feature we shipped was worth more. It was the piece that made the rest make sense.
One form, many cases. Fields appear based on what the person enters.
Faster, and a first AI feature
Two more changed how the editor felt to use. A live preview, so you build a form and see the real thing as you go, and catch errors before it ships.
And form creation from a prompt, one of the first AI features at Camunda, which got you from idea to a working draft in one step.
Build the form and see the real thing at once, with no engineer in the loop
Outcome
More of the target users moved onto the editor. Customers who had only ever hand-coded their forms switched to building them here. It went from a tool almost no one opened to a core part of how customers build and run their processes, and it is in the product today.
My role
Design lead and IC across the Form Editor, in a triad with product and a development team.
This was my first area at Camunda, and I owned its design from a basic builder to what it is now.