There are two things that make any app click—how simple it is to use, and how effective it is in addressing the problem it’s meant to solve. An intuitive design enhances simplicity by focusing on user experience.
You’ll come across this in the apps you use every day. For example, an e-commerce site might display products that are related to or commonly bought with the item you searched for. In technical terms, we call this auto-populating a field based on input in another field. These fields may or may not be contained in the same form.
The logic behind this is pretty easy to understand—just store, fetch, and display. To demonstrate how useful the auto-populate feature is, let’s consider Zoho Creator’s restaurant application. What if you could display images based on a guest’s menu selection? It would come in handy when customers order directly from their tablets or phones.
Let’s look at how to do this in 3 easy steps.
Form 1 – Enter and upload.
Create a form with two fields: one to hold the name of the dishes on your menu and another to upload an image of the dish.
Tip #1 – Don’t stop with names and images. Zoho Creator supports 24 different field types to cater to your exact specifications.
Form 2 – Design the menu.
Get creative. Think about the fields you want, then drag and drop them to build your menu. Finally, add the Add notes field to your form to display the image.
Tip #2 – The notes field can be used to display any data type. You can use it to auto-generate information, or hide it based on the user’s input.
Fetch and display the image.
In this step, you’ll fetch the image from the first form’s report and display it in the second form, based on the user’s menu selection. You’ll need the image URL to do this.
Getting the image Address: An image URL points to the image on the internet. It looks like this:
#- Form 1 report -> Right click on the image to get the image address.
Fetch the image:
The ID and file extension are different for every image. To display the image, you’ll need to construct an image tag. Since you want to display the image only when the customer selects an item on the menu, you’ll add the script under the On User Input segment of the second form’s Product module.
Tip #3 – Zoho Creator has a range of built-in functions and Deluge system variables that can come in handy when you’re building an app.
Easy, isn’t it? As cliched as it may sound, the smallest of things make huge differences. You can add a lot of user-friendly features to your app, and in doing so, deliver more value to your customers. Can you think of any other features that’ll make your app more intuitive? Please let us know in the comments below.
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