(+/-) button next to integer questions for easier input

[mxncdln]

Context : I work for a company that has been using ODK collect for three years with an important quantity of submissions throughout the world. Our teams have been willing to improve Forms to gain efficiency.

Question : Recently, we are facing an issue concerning counting units in the field.
Indeed, it is not user friendly to count by changing manually figures therefore a (+/-) button next to integer questions for easier input.

CCL: hope the demand is clear and more hopefully that somoneone has an anwser.
Thanks in advance.

What high-level problem are you trying to solve?
Medium priority, the feature is a nice to have yet it might be usefull to a lot of person of the community !

Any ideas on how ODK could help you solve it?
First I cannot find a similar question yet I wouldn't be surprises if anyone had already asked this.
Second, maybe ODK can help developing this solution or helping us (my company) to developd the solution.

Upload any helpful links, sketches, and videos.

[mathieubossaert]

Hi @mxncdln
Welcome to the ODK community forum. When you get a chance please take some time to introduce yourself here.

You'll probably be interested by this thread :

Form design: grid of text or numeric input

My ideal UX for grids are click counters of things in 2 by 2 categories. My concrete example are turtle tracks. While I'm capturing a geotrace in the background, I walk along a beach and tap to add one count to a relevant cell. My columns are turtle species, the rows are types of tracks. I want to use each cell as a click counter (value plus one) and also be able to correct a misplaced click (value minus one). For this, I need to see the value (an integer number), a large plus button and a sma…

[lynchs]

I really like this, and 100% need this.

[mxncdln]

@mathieubossaert
Hey Mathieu, thank you for you quick response, indeed this thread is exactly what I am talking about !

Do you have any idea about who / how I could get more information to understand if this will be planified in the ODK roadmap ?

[mathieubossaert]

@mxncdln

Do you have any idea about who / how I could get more information to understand if this will be planified in the ODK roadmap ?

No but it should be interesting to document your own use case in the thread in order to help the team to get the best big picture about this feature.

Anyway you'll find the roadmap here

[LN]

We are currently finishing up feature work for Collect v2024.2 and are targeting an end of May release.

We know that the biggest items for v2024.3 will be offline Entities and edits of local submissions. We will also add a few smaller improvements and will consider this as we do our release planning at the beginning of June.

[mxncdln]

Hello LN,
Thank you such a great news to hear !
I wish you the best.

[mxncdln]

Dear @LN ,
I am pretty sure that I read (maybe in june) a presentation regarding the new features to come which indeed included the (+/-) button, yet I cannot find it again ...

Do you have any news on this feature release and / or about the presentation ? (cannot find it in the annoucement forum ..)

Thank you again for your help

[Grzesiek2010]

Hi @mxncdln
It will be a part of v2024.3 which should be released in October. The beta version is already available and you can read more about it here ODK Collect v2024.3 Beta: offline Entities, counter, map scale

[LN]

Thanks for the input on this, everyone! ODK Collect v2024.3.0 is now available with the counter question type.

@mathieubossaert has already shared an inspiring form here and @ahblake and @Stephen_K_ojwang came up with another very interesting example usage here.

Please share what problems you end up addressing with this new question type!