Android survey app for collating fisheries data.
Blue Ventures current Octopus Monitoring solution is an Open Data Kit form used with the ODK Collect application (source on Github).
The collected data is uploaded to an ODK Aggregate instance running on Google App Engine. Once uploaded it can be read by any suitable system for generating reports.
- ODK Collect usability is extremey poor
- Manual entry of today's date
- Validation issues, eg. possible to select later start time than end time.
- Logical issues with existing form, eg.
- if you select all for 'How much of the total catch was sold' the user is still presented on the next screen with the question 'What did/will you do with the rest?'
- Select Gleaning for method, next screen asks: 'What fishing equipment did they use (gleaning)?' with answers 'Hook and line, Spear, Other' - are these answers relevant for gleaning?
- Fields aren't cached and need to be re-entered/selected every time, some could/should be preselected but still editable:
- Name of village
- Date collector name
- Name, age, sex of main fisher
- Fishing site and zonation name/type
- Fishing method (Free-diving, Gleaning, Snorkelling)
- Repetion of octopus weight, requested on two screens
- Local currency required for 'Price per kg paid', would be better to have dropdown of currencies and cache selection. Also are transactions always in kg?
- Create a custom Android app with improved UI so data collection is easier to carry out in the field.
- Evaluate the suitability of ODK, and any alternatives for the backend. ODK Aggregate does have an API so it may be possible to improve the UX but keep the existing backend, however the data format is custom Open Rosa XForms XML which feels extremely heavyweight and dated. More info here and here.
Develop an Android app to replace the ODK Collect form, maintain a strict separation of concerns between the form and the upload so it can easily be swapped out (proxy code to upload to ODK instance, upload to custom web service populating a DB, Firebase).
App should include local store to queue entries (using Realm) that can be uploaded at a later time so the app can be used in the field without cell/wifi access.
UI needs to support obscure local dialects, so the app may not be able to use native localisation features and will need its own mechanism to replace Strings in the UI.