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What's New in Survey123 for ArcGIS v2.8

The latest release of Survey123 for ArcGIS introduces great enhancements to the Survey123 website to help you design, share and understand surveys better.  This update is for the most part focused on enhancements to web surveys, although a handful of fixes have also been made available for Survey123 Connect and the Survey123 field app. Here is what is new!

Survey123 Web Designer Enhancements

 

Survey123 Web Designer lets you visually build your own surveys, right from a web browser. In this update, we have added features particularly useful for those of you who plan to publish surveys for exclusive use from web browsers (Web Forms).

 

New Single Choice Grid questions: Survey123 web designer now includes a new type of question called Single Choice Grid. This question type lets you to arrange a set of single choice questions in a table.  The only condition is that all single choice questions in the table use of the same choice list.

 

There are multiple scenarios where Single Choice Grids are useful.  A classic one is checklists, like the one presented below for a Fire Safety inspection.

New Grid Choice Question

Single Choice Grids will help you compact questions within your forms allowing users to enter data more easily.  As you add Single Choice Grid questions into your form, keep in mind the following:

 

 

Custom Thank You Notes: Thank You notes are presented right after a survey is submitted from a Web Form (from the Survey123 Web App). It is good practice to control the text presented in this dialog.  This is of course the right place to thank respondents for taking time to complete your survey, but also a great place to acknowledge sponsors of your project or direct respondents to your website, next actions etc.

 

Starting with this update, we added a rich text editor widget so you can better control the look and feel of your Thank You notes. You can add links, images, define the size and color of text and more.

From within Web Designer you will be able to preview your Thank You note and also control if a link should be included to allow respondents to submit the survey again.

 

Geosearch for Geopoint questions at design time: Through the new geosearch widget included in geopoint questions, you can now more easily set the initial extent and zoom level of your map. This is particularly relevant for online surveys where people will submit data through a Web Form.   When your survey is open from a web browser, you cannot assume that the map will be centered automatically at the user’s location, because often location services are disabled in browsers for privacy reasons.  With this new geosearch widget there is really no excuse for you to leave an initial map extent that is not relevant to your project!

Geosearch in Web Designer

Survey Collaborate Tab

 

Through the Collaborate tab in the Survey123 website, you control who can submit data to your surveys, and who can view their results.

 

Restrict Viewer Access: Through the Viewer category in the Collaborate tab, you define which Groups within your ArcGIS organization can visualize the results of your survey. We have added a new option that lets you control if access to the survey results is restricted to survey entries submitted by the logged-in user, or all results in the survey.

New Sec

As the owner of a survey, this option gives you tighter control over what data can people see in your surveys. Here is a scenario where this new option will be handy:  Pretend that you have published a survey for a group of Building Inspectors. Through Collaborate/Submitter you have already granted them access to your survey, so all Building Inspectors are happily submitting their work to you.   Next, you would also like Building Inspectors to have access to their own submitted data through the Survey123 website.   Through Collaborate/Viewer you will next grant the Inspectors Group with access to the results of the survey, but since you do not want inspectors to see someone else’s  work, you will grant visibility to ‘Only their own submitted records‘.   At that moment, inspectors can log into the Survey123 website and access their own records. For example, they can use the Data tab in the Survey123 website to export all their inspection data into Excel, generate high quality printable reports of their inspection records or even look at trends across their own inspections through the Analyze tab. Administrators of the ArcGIS organization and owners of the survey will always have access to all records.

 

Shortened survey URL links (ArcGIS Online only): If working against ArcGIS Online, the next time you share a survey URL with someone or include it into a website or e-mail, you will note that the Survey123 website will shorten them for you.  The animation below shows the difference between the shortened and original URLs.

We feel like shortened URLs are easier for most people, but if you are a nostalgic, purist or you simply want the original URL, all you need to do is to copy the shortened URL into a web browser and navigate to it. You will see that the shortened URL is simply a shortcut that gets redirected to the source (and long) URL of your survey.

 

Survey Analyze and Data Tabs

 

Photo Galleries in the Analyze report:  Up until now, Image and Signature questions in your survey were not  included in the Analyze report. Starting with this update, photo galleries will be used to display data submitted into Image and Signature questions.

The new galleries will let you more quickly scan large collections of photos submitted to your survey and if needed, by clicking on them, get more details on the photo itself.

 

Sort surveys by date in the Data tab table: The Data tab shows your survey results as a map and a table. Some of you suggested that data in the table should show the newest surveys on top by default. We think this is a good idea too, so rows are now sorted by the Edit Date column, in descending order. If you would like to sort using a different column, all you need to do is to click on the column header and set your sorting preference.

 

Barcode question support in Individual Response reports (Data tab): The individual response report shown when you select a record from the survey table now supports Barcode questions as well, which are treated similarly to Text questions.

Survey Gallery

 

Launch Connect directly from the survey gallery: You can now easily launch Survey123 Connect from the survey gallery to make updates and re-publish your Connect surveys. This option will only work if you have Survey123 Connect 2.7 or newer.  I trust you will have Connect in its latest release. Right?  You would actually not believe how many people out there are still running 1.x versions of Connect!

Major Bug Fixes and Enhancements

 

Survey123 Web Form (aka Survey123 Web App):

 

 

Survey123 website:

 

 

Survey123 field app and Connect:

 

Beyond 2.8

 

Our next major release will be 3.0, which we envision shipping around July 2018.  Here is what we are planning for our next updates:

 

 

A lot in the plate as  you can see for 3.0. Our focus however it is not going to deviate from listening carefully to all your feedback through our Survey123 GeoNet Group, so keep your questions and suggestions coming!

About the author

Ismael Chivite joined Esri in 2002. A geographer by training, he loves helping people leverage GIS to improve the way they work. As a Senior Product Manager, Ismael is always looking for ideas to create new and improve existing Esri products. Outside working hours: Legos, rock climbing, Romanesque architecture and jamon iberico. On occasion, he enjoys jamon during working hours too.

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