Product Review: HCL Leap
Summary
HCL Leap, formerly known as IBM Forms Experience Builder, is a web-based design tool for creating surveys, multi-staged applications and complex web applications. It is part of the recent wave of low/no code solutions that provide users with the capability of building an application without much coding. HCL Leap offers way more standard functionality than Microsoft or Google forms; however, the easy-to-configure application falls short of being an enticing product. Once the business requirements become too sophisticated, the developer will need to have an intermediate level of JavaScript knowledge to implement many of these features. It sits in the uncomfortable matrix position between Microsoft Forms and designing your own custom web application (See image below). Unfortunately, at this point of knowledge and effort required you will ask yourself one final question: Why didn’t I create my own web app to collect this data?
Assessment Notes
- Learning Curve (XX% of capabilities)
- (50%) Learning the basics of configuration is quite easy. It is similar to many other BI products that exist.
- (25%) There are some non-intuitive configuration features that require a lot of trial and error, solo research, and/or consulting an expert to implement correctly.
- (25%) The last portion requires having a solid background in JS/CSS to implement these requirements.
- There are enough resources online to become familiar with the product and build simple surveys; however, sophisticated surveys will be difficult with the current set of available online resources.
- User Interface
- Limited CSS background themes come standard with the application
- Intermediate CSS knowledge is required to implement any non-standard background
- Configuration and User Experience
- Adding the ability to save the form can become complicated, requires “stages”
- Configuring logic to dynamically restrict user input based on other responses will require JS
- Difficult to accommodate many to many relationships in data collection
- Collecting data via a “Table” is treated differently than data collected via other objects
- No automatic numbering for questions
- Browsers
- Minor limitations in Chrome (e.g. cannot delete a page in Chrome)
- Configuration Limitations
- Configuration is similar to other BI products making it simple to build pages, questions, headings, and add images.
- Sophisticated business requirements will often require writing JS code to control how objects interact in the application
- Data Extraction (i.e. survey results)
- Data can be extracted via the REST API in a JSON or XML format
- Example: /forms/secure/org/data/[App ID]/[Form ID]?format=application%2Fjson
- REST API Documentation
- Difficult to match up question IDs with the actual question (e.g. Question123 –> What is your name?)
- Data can be extracted via the REST API in a JSON or XML format