ArcGIS Survey123

What's New in Survey123 for ArcGIS v3.2

Here we are again, a new update to Survey123 is available. This release includes a handful of  exciting new features to help you build even better smart forms on top of  ArcGIS.   We added support for multiple-page surveys, enhanced word clouds and introduced a simple way to embedded surveys within a web site.   With 3.2, you will also find great fixes and other minor enhancements. Here are the details:

Pages for your web forms

In this update you can organize questions in your surveys across multiple pages. Pages are particularly useful when working on very large forms, helping you logically organize your questions and giving end users a sense of progress across the entire survey.

In the example above, I added a welcome image and text on the first page to create a cover for  my survey. Note that the first page does not expect any input from the survey. It is just a welcoming page, or cover.  Next, I organized the actual questions within my form into pages, giving each page a descriptive title at the top.  As users move from page to page, a progress bar at the bottom shows how close they are to the end of the survey.

 

Tip: You can combine groups and pages to further help organize questions within your survey!

 

If you use web designer to create your surveys, you will find that we have added a Page option in the main panel. Just like you do with other question types, simply click on Page, and it will be added to your form. You will be able to drag and drop questions into your new page, move questions from one page to another and even merge and duplicate pages!

If you want to work with pages in Survey123 Connect, you need to do two things:

 

 

Also note that when using the pages style, pages will be automatically created for any question outside field-list groups.

Embedded public web forms

You can now embed public web forms in your own web site. As shown below, the Collaborate tab of your survey will now include an Embed option from which you can copy the HTML code needed to embed your survey within a web site.

A handful of embed options let you quickly configure your embed HTML code to hide elements of your survey that you may want to hide, such as the header, sign-in, multiple language options, footer, etc.  You can even disable the theme colors to provide a more neutral presence of your embedded survey within the web site.

Better word clouds

The Survey123 website includes a number of reporting capabilities to help you understand data captured through your surveys. The Analyze page, for example, aggregates responses for categorical, date and number questions and creates charts and maps to more quickly identify trends on your data.

Questions with free text are always trickier to aggregate, but that is where word clouds come to help. A word cloud takes the most common words found in your data and sizes them according to popularity. The bigger the word, the more repetitions. It is a simple concept but it often gives great insight.  Unfortunately, the most common words in our language are far from interesting in this context. Think about it: this, that, of, a…  all pretty useless stuff in a word cloud, don’t you think?  These words are known as stop-words, and now you can set a filter to ignore them (at this moment, only in English).

Here you can see how word cloud filters made a difference for our friends at City of Lakeland, in Florida:

In this particular scenario, the survey asked people in the city ‘What are your thoughts on how can we better educate drivers to pay attention?’. The most popular words among the responses are ‘the‘, ‘and‘, ‘to‘ and ‘of‘, but if we  apply the stop word filter, much more relevant words will come out:  speed, signs and people.  With stop word filters you can more easily understand certain relevant trends in your data.

 

More on custom themes

 

We introduced Custom Themes not long ago. Definitely a good addition to give your surveys a nice final touch! If you haven’t already, I highly recommend you watch this video-tutorial or read the Introducing Custom Themes blog post.

In this update 6 new theme templates have been added. 5 of them will help you quickly switch through different color combinations. You can also make tweaks in them, of course, but they provide a nice start.  The sixth template is more interesting, in that it will mirror the Shared Theme of your ArcGIS organization.  If you are not familiar with this concept of Shared Theme, have a look at Ian’s blog post Introducing Shared Theme: a new app styling capability in ArcGIS Online.  The Shared Theme is set by the administrator of an ArcGIS Organization defining the basics for styling configurable apps in it: text and background color, etc.  Now, you can easily match that style!

 

Other enhancements and fixes

 

Survey123 Website

 

 

Survey123 Connect

 

 

Survey123 Field App

 

 

Tip: Did you know that using XLSForm you can choose to save the label of the selected item in a list instead of the name? For more details see: Survey123 Tricks of the Trade: XLSForm functions for lists 

 

 

For more details on the 3.2 release, check out our What’s New Help Topic, which also includes an archive of all new features added in previous releases.

About the author

ismael

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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