Creators often struggle with generic form tools that lack customization and fail to address specific needs, leading to inefficient workflows and miscommunication.
Develop a form-building application that offers unique blocks, communication channel between form creators and respondents, and recipient management.
brifl offers a range of customizable niche blocks, including typography, color palettes, and board.
To shape brifl's product direction, I studied popular form-building tools with a strong foothold in professional workflows. The goal wasn't to replicate their feature sets, but to understand how they solve (or fail to solve) problems for creatives — especially in the early stages of project communication.
While tools like Jotform, SurveyMonkey, and Typeform offer comprehensive and enterprise-grade features, they often fall short in creating a streamlined and empathetic space for creative collaboration. For brifl's MVP, I made a conscious decision to deprioritize complexity and instead focus on shared understanding between creatives and their clients.
The benchmark analysis also reveals opportunities for future improvements — features that could be layered into brifl thoughtfully and gradually, as the product evolves.
Brifl empowers creators with versatile forms built from over 30 different block types and seamless third-party integrations, all while fostering communication through unique sender-responder links. It simplifies recipient management and benefits from a community-driven, open-source platform.
Unlike traditional form tools that target narrow user personas, brifl was designed for multidisciplinary creatives who often juggle multiple roles or work across different industries. To reflect this diversity, I took an archetype-driven approach rather than relying on rigid personas.
By researching online communities and conducting interviews with creative professionals, I identified four key archetypes that brifl aims to support: Designer, Developer, Writer, and Photographer.
Each of these archetypes has specific workflows and pain points that current form tools fail to address — particularly around client onboarding, brief gathering, and scope alignment. brifl's design decisions were rooted in surfacing and solving these unmet needs.
Although brifl was never launched — primarily due to the lack of a developer and my limited knowledge of JavaScript at the time — the project became one of the most formative experiences in my product design journey. What started as a side hustle grew into a meaningful learning process, and a clear step forward in my transition toward systems thinking and user-centered design.
This story ends here yet the journey continues...
