Static Forms vs. Smart Forms

As Founding Product Designer at Halda, I designed and built our Smart Form Builder. We set out to fix dead end inquiry forms by replacing standard "Thank you, we'll be in touch" confirmation pages with interactive, personalized action plans for prospective students.

• Company: Halda.AI
• Role: Founding Product Designer (UX/UI, Design Systems, Builder Interactions, Frontend)
• Scope: Web App Canvas/Builder UI, Embedded Web Components (Pop ups, Slide outs, Banners, etc.), Analtyics, CRM Integration and Artificial Intellegence features.
• Impact: Replaced Unbounce across all client campaigns, increased secondary engagement by 42%, and scaled platform architecture through early funding rounds.

Eliminate Generic Forms

Universities spend significant budget buying cold contact lists and driving traffic to prospective student landing pages. Yet standard Request For Information (RFI) forms consistently lose momentum right after a visitor submits their details.

The main problem wasn't gathering initial lead information, it was what happened next.

When prospective students or parents submitted a form, they met a generic confirmation message and a long wait. To fix this gap, we built a tool that processes student responses on the fly, delivering tailored steps and information the moment they click submit.

Minimum Viable Product

During my first few months at Halda, I designed and built custom landing pages using Unbounce. To offer better responses than standard static forms, I wrote basic logic scripts to branch outcomes based on user answers. Even with these simple setups, secondary engagement grew enough to confirm we should build a native form editor.

For the next year, I balanced two main tracks: Maintaining our Unbounce workflow for existing clients while working along side our CTO to design and code early versions of our native builder so we could sunset the third party subscription.

The Canvas

We designed the canvas as a single screen workspace divided into three main zones: navigation on the left, a visual preview in the center and dynamic properties on the right. This layout keeps all three core building blocks styles, questions, and responses accessible without switching views.

1. The Billboard

The canvas breaks the process down into three main areas. Opening the builder loads the design canvas by default, where users can style and arrange the primary container area (the Billboard).

To speed up setup, the app scrapes brand assets, colors, typography and logo files directly from a university’s domain to preload initial design properties.

2. The Form

Users manage form logic and question order from either the left side bar or top navigation bar. The right hand panel shows corresponding properties for whichever question type is currently selected (such as GPA selectors, radio groups, dropdowns, or conditional branching fields).

3. The Repsonse Page

Adding a response card in the left navigation opens its corresponding parameters in the inspector panel. Each response card runs specific logic modules, such as dynamic calculations or comparison benchmarks. Teams can write copy manually or prompt the underlying engine which references the University's documents and web pages to generate responses tailored to the student’s inputs.

Results & Impact

The completion of the Smart Form Builder is a significant step forward in achieving Product Lead Growth strategy. Moving off third party landing page builders onto our own platform gave us control over the end to end experience and allowed us to scale setup across Higher Ed accounts efficiently, expanded from a handful of initial University partners to several hundred. Secondary user actions across client sites grew by 42% and overall online enrollment increase of 10%.

The Smart Form Builder is the key feature of the Halda platform, its' success in providing value for Universities and acquiring new partnerships has led Halda to securing three million in venture funding from multiple investors.

Thanks for reading.