Another small nugget of practical knowledge from me.
When you’re building a project as a solo developer, you need a quick way to gather feedback or collect data without reinventing the wheel. While you can always write more code, you often don’t have to. Sometimes you can even ship something with just a frontend! Pre-filled Google Forms can offer a solution in these situations. Whether you need to create a basic contact form, allow order customization, gather feature requests, bug reports, or collect structured data from users, this method is simple, effective, and easy to implement.
The strength of this approach lies in passing the data from your app into the form URL, auto-filling certain fields to save users time and encourage them to complete the form. Also, you may pass identifiers allowing you to integrate this data quickly without manual parsing.
Real-world example: gathering airport data
Let’s say you’re running a project like mine - airportregistry.com, where users can look up and manage information about airports worldwide. You want to let users quickly request corrections or updates to airport data directly from the site.
Instead of asking users to manually enter details about the airport they’re viewing, you can pre-fill these fields in a Google Form with data from your site, making it much easier for them to submit feedback. Here's an example:
const requestInfoLink =
`https://docs.google.com/forms/` +
`d/e/1FAIpQLSfAVYhpjNOZR6_gMPJPtlFYPRqGaem_rFb8nQ4CV27VTgmGzA/viewform?usp=pp_url` +
`&entry.1513837494=${airport.airport}` +
`&entry.20379740=${airport.iataCode}` +
`&entry.475896124=${airport.location}` +
`&entry.166674403=${airport.country}` +
`&entry.60635846=${airport.continent}`;
With this setup, when a user clicks the feedback link, they’ll be taken to a Google Form with details like the airport name, IATA code, location, country, and continent already filled in. This removes friction and increases the chances that users will provide meaningful feedback.
- Create a new form: Start by creating a new Google Form with the fields you need. For example, you might include fields like “Airport Name,” “IATA Code,” “Location,” etc.
- Set up pre-fillable fields:
- Click the three-dot menu (ellipsis) in the upper right corner and choose "Get pre-filled link."
- Enter some placeholder values in the fields you want to pre-fill. Use easily recognizable placeholders like “AirportNamePlaceholder,” “IATACodePlaceholder,” etc. This makes it easier to identify and replace them in the generated link.
- Click "Get link" and copy the URL provided by Google.
- Customize the link:
- The URL you copied will contain placeholders that look something like
entry.123456789=AirportNamePlaceholder.
- Replace these placeholder values with variables or data from your app, as shown in the example above.
Tada! You saved yourself some time you would waste writing frontend and backend code.
Wrapping up
Pre-filled Google Forms offer a straightforward way to integrate feedback and data entry mechanisms into your app without writing code.
Use the time saved to really focus on providing value with other features in your app.
Do you think this is bad? How many users does your app have? Hm?
If you liked this content, please support me by sharing this post and subscribing to my Newsletter. Also check out the website where I applied this technique - airportregistry.com!
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