What Web Forms features would make the biggest difference for you?

Community
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As ODK Web Forms continues to mature, we're thinking about future investments and would love to hear from the community about which features would be most valuable in your workflows.

We'd love to understand:

  1. Which features would be most valuable to your organization?
  2. Are any of these features blockers preventing you from using Web Forms today?
  3. If you could choose only 3–5 features for us to prioritize, which would they be?
  4. Are there important Web Forms capabilities not listed here that you'd like to see?

Specific examples of workflows or use cases are especially helpful for understanding the impact.

Features currently available in Enketo but not yet in Web Forms

Some examples include:

  • End-of-form experience (thank you messages, redirects, etc.)
  • Range questions with tick marks
  • Table of contents / form navigation
  • Audio capture
  • Branding and customization
  • Picture capture
  • Date appearance options (for example, without a calendar picker)
  • URL question type
  • Range picker appearance
  • Large images in labels
  • Guidance hints
  • Range rating appearance

Potential Web Forms features beyond Enketo

We're also exploring features that are not currently available in Enketo, such as:

  • Geospatial intersects
  • Alt text for attachments
  • Non-Gregorian calendars
  • Printing forms or submissions
  • Barcode scanning
  • Hidden-answer support
  • Counter appearance
  • Theme colors
  • Video capture
  • Image, audio, and video labels for rank questions

Please respond below if you’re up for a longer interview!

2 Likes
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Of the listed options, we'd get the most value from

  • ToC/navigation
  • Printing
  • Barcode (not currently in use but I have plans)

Of unlisted options, they would be, in approximate order (and all more important than the listed options)

  • being able to push an image file into an image question as a default for annotation
    • (this stops being able to use WF for new submissions for most forms)
  • big-image support to view/zoom/pan (choices & labels)
    • (this doesn't stop use but does restrict functionality a lot)
  • maptiles support in some form and higher zoom levels
    • (this doesn't stop use but does restrict mapping accuracy a lot)
  • geo styling support
  • image-map support
  • not needing to pause/refresh the form to have updated entity values available to it post submission

I have interviewed previously but am happy to go again as WF has progressed dramatically since the last time.

2 Likes
3

Thank you for being open to input. We love the way Web Forms is going.

Our use case: We collect quick user feedback at many different places. These places are pre-registered with metadata by us. To make answering as easy as possible for end users, we encode the place ID in a URL field (a new feature that will be released soon), so that users do not need to identify the place they review, and we can add the metadata later.

Three areas of improvement would benefit us the most, in this order of priority:

  1. End-of-form experience, because we need to re-direct users to a FAQ page, and hidden-answer support, because values pre-filled from the URL (e.g. place ID) can be confusing and so users should not be able to edit them.

  2. Barcode scanning and picture capture, both to reduce dependency on ODK Collect when pre-registering places. Some of us who pre-register places do not have Android devices.

  3. A few options to customize the form style, especially better options to include a logo, change text size of the form title (even hide it for a very short survey) and set a basic theme color. This would make the form more recognizable for our users, improve trust and make answering more likely.

I am open to interviewing, should additional information be helpful to you.

4 Likes
4

Thanks for the work put into maturing web form to this far. For my case I would prioritize these 3 features:

  1. Entity segmentation for authenticated web form users for back office staff case management.
  2. Printing (printing appearance widget)- for rendering html contents of the field forms. Will be useful for making custom weekly or monthly reporting templates pulling data from entity list automating the reporting cycles. Web forms on laptops can now do complex html weaving as opposed to low end mobile devices.
  3. Grid theme - to render forms in a spreadsheet like manner thus improving data entry experience and automatic data validations within the grids (cells)

I am happy to engage further about these.

Cheers.

3 Likes