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The goal of your invitation form is to make it as easy as possible for your users to invite their teammates or friends. Maximizing the number of invitations sent per unique viewer of your invitation form involves providing a robust set of invitation features that are appropriate for your audience, while at the same time making sure the form is easy to understand and not overly complex. Vortex will generate a default invitation form based on what we’re able to learn about your service via your publicly available website. For example, the features appropriate for a B2B service will be different than those for a B2C service. Of course, these are just defaults and we encourage you to tweak them as you see fit, and to experiment with different options using Vortex’s built-in A/B testing. The Invite Form tab of your invitation flow is where you’ll configure and style your form.

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Settings

There are three main categories that correspond to the different invitation methods. Commonly referred to as shareable links, these invitation links can be distributed by your users however they see fit. For example, they may copy the link and paste it into a Slack channel or a WhatsApp chat. The various toggles are ways you can facilitate that distribution by providing deep links into the message composition experience for common distribution channels.
  • Copy link button - Provides a button that copies the shareable link to the user’s clipboard so that they can paste it elsewhere. This is the most common option for B2B services, especially on the web, since the links are most frequently copied and shared into Slack and Microsoft Teams.
  • Share link via SMS - Provides a button that opens the user’s messaging app and prefills a message that includes the shareable link.
  • Share link via Instagram DMs - Provides a button that opens Instagram and prefills a message that includes the shareable link. This option is only available for mobile invitation flows.
  • Share link via X DMs - Provides a button that opens X (formerly Twitter) and prefills a message that includes the shareable link.
  • Share link via WhatsApp - Provides a button that opens WhatsApp and prefills a message that includes the shareable link.
  • Share link via QR code - Provides a button that displays a QR code that represents the shareable link.
  • Share link via native share sheet - Provides a button that opens the native share sheet, where common sharing options are controlled by the device’s operating system. While many B2C services like to control the specific sharing destinations offered via the above options, other services leave it to the OS to offer the most common options. This is particularly true with B2B services on mobile devices.
  • Share link via email - Provides a button that is a mailto link that opens the user’s email client and prefills an email with a message that includes the shareable link. The important distinction between this, and the Invite via email options below, is that in this case the email is being delivered by the user.

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Invite via email

These are invitations that Vortex will deliver on your behalf to the email addresses your users enter/select.
  • User-entered email addresses - Users manually enter one or more email addresses.
  • Select from Google contacts - Users invite people from their list of contacts on Google. You’ll need to create a Google app if you offer this option.
  • Select from device contacts - Users invite people from their device’s native address book. Currenlt only available for mobile invitation flows.
  • Domain Restriction - When any of the above options are enabled, you may optionally indicate that email invitations should be restricted to certain domains. The domains would likely be specific to each of your customers, and you would pass in the appropriate list for a given user via the JWT payload.
  • Send different emails to existing users - If you allow invitations to existing users, you may want to automatically accept these invitations and send emails that serve as an announcement (that don’t require the invitee to take any action) rather than an invitation email.

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Autojoin

Autojoin allows users to join based on the domain of their email address. For example, AcmeTasks may allow anyone to join their workspace on your service by signing up with an @acmetasks.com email address. Adding the autojoin checkbox to your invitation form is just one method you can use to allow your customers to enable autojoin. Read more about autojoin to learn more. The checkbox to enable autojoin should only be exposed to users in your customer organizations that have appropriate priviledges (e.g., admins). You control this by including the autojoinscope in the adminScopes parameter of your JWT payload when the current user has sufficient priviledges.

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Elements

Since the invitation form will be an integral part of your application you’ll want to make sure that it matches your application’s look and feel. Select an element from the dropdown at the top of the Elements tab, or click on an element in the form preview, to control the details of its styling (fonts, colors, borders, spacing, etc.).

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Auto Style

To save you time, click on the Auto Style button above the form preview at the right and you’ll be prompted to upload a screenshot of an existing form from your application. Vortex will extract your form’s styles from the sreenshot and apply them to your invitation form. While the results will not be 100% accurate, it will get you very close and minimize the amount of manual styling that you have to do.

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Add Element

The Add Element tab allows you to add custom fields and other elements to your form.
  • Form Elements - Use form elements to add custom fields to your invitation form in order to collect additional information that will apply to ALL invitees. For example, you might specify the role of the people being invited (e.g., Member or Admin). Note that custom fields only apply to email invitations, and not shareable links, so ideally they would be placed on the form in a way that makes this clear. Also consider that every additional field you add to your form makes it just a little more complex. While some fields may truly be required here, others could be removed in favor of default values that get applied during your registration process and could be updated later.
  • Content Elements - Additional content such as text areas, images and links.
Note that you can use template variables to personalize the copy in your invitation form. For example, the title of your form could include the name of the organization/workspace that the user is inviting people to join… “Invite people to {{workspace_name}}”. When you drag an element onto your form, unless you drop it into an empty cell in an existing row, a new row will automatically be created at the spot where you drop the new element.