Free-form surveys

[nickbadams]

Expected behaviour

When in Timeline view and clicking on a post title in order to view post responses, we would like to see the responses displayed in the same sequence as the original survey questions.

Actual behaviour

The responses display in order of question type.

Steps to reproduce the behaviour/error

See DemoWatch deployment's posts. Survey Tasks 1, 2, and 4 display according to the bug. 3 displays properly (for some reason).

Aha! Link: https://ushahiditeam.aha.io/features/PROD-681

[jshorland]

@brandonrosage I'm not sure I completely understand this. Is this clear to you?

[brandonrosage]

@jshorland After investigating the issue on demowatch.ushahidi.io, I understand the problem. I'll carve out time to address this this week at the hit team.

We hear you, @nickbadams. I'll be in touch shortly.

[nickbadams]

Y'all are great. Thank you!

On Sun, Aug 21, 2016 at 7:43 PM, Brandon Rosage notifications@github.com
wrote:

@jshorland https://github.com/jshorland After investigating the issue
on demowatch.ushahidi.io, I understand the problem. I'll carve out time
to address this this week at the hit team.

We hear you, @nickbadams https://github.com/nickbadams. I'll be in
touch shortly.

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*Nick Adams, Ph.D.Research Fellow – Social Science, *

Berkeley Institute for Data Science
University of California, Berkeley

[rjmackay]

@brandonrosage does this need dev attention? or just design?

[jshorland]

@brandonrosage I'm moving this to design because i'm still not completely clear the desired behaviour here -- is this a bug, ux issue, or new feature?

[brandonrosage]

@jshorland This is the impetus for the "free-form surveys" issue we've discussed over the past few weeks. I'd like for it to be high-priority, and therefore slotted into the earliest sprint possible. If it looks like that'll be possible, I'll prepare a feature branch right away, demonstrating it.

[nickbadams]

! :)

On Thu, Sep 22, 2016 at 2:41 PM, Brandon Rosage notifications@github.com
wrote:

@jshorland https://github.com/jshorland This is the impetus for the
"free-form surveys" issue we've discussed over the past few weeks. I'd like
for it to be high-priority, and therefore slotted into the earliest sprint
possible. If it looks like that'll be possible, I'll prepare a feature
branch right away, demonstrating it.

—
You are receiving this because you were mentioned.
Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub
#1335 (comment),
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.

*Nick Adams, Ph.D.Research Fellow – Social Science, *

Berkeley Institute for Data Science
University of California, Berkeley

[jshorland]

Thanks for that context @brandonrosage. let's get this thing built. I'm going to tag it with Sprint 12 for now.

[rjmackay]

Ok.. for the benefit of the spectators (me!) can @jshorland or @brandonrosage add a few sentence scope to this issue? I'm not sure what 'free form surveys' are compared to status-quo.

[brandonrosage]

@rjmackay: "Free-form surveys" is shorthand for an approach to assembling a survey's fields in any order, with only the fields necessary for that survey. So we don't assume things like a "Title" text field, "Description" textarea, or "Location" location field.

The deployer dictates what each of their survey's fields are, what they're called, and what order they're in.

Furthermore, this creates a challenge to the design system with regard to how we display postcards when many won't have a traditional title, etc. The solution we discussed in Montreal involved a modest interface for the deployer to indicate which fields they would want to display in each survey's postcard (and in what layout).

Assuming this feature is clear for takeoff, I'll create a feature branch to demonstrate these things.

[brandonrosage]

@rjmackay, @jshorland, @caharding, @nickbadams: I've completed a wave of initial work and thought on this "free-form surveys" solution. There's a lot of detail I won't cover just yet (like how things change depending on your permissions, or what things default to). I'll try to keep this first brain dump concise.

Configuring a survey

When creating a new survey, here's what you get:

Selecting "Add field" first displays a mainsheet asking you to indicate what type of field:

Selecting "Appearance" displays a modal window for configuring, A, your survey's color, and B, which of your fields you want to display in the postcards (called "response summaries" in the UI):

Selecting "Permissions" displays a modal window for configuring moderation and access:

A complete survey configuration might look like this:

Surveys

So what would it look like to "fill out" a survey?

...scrolling...

Postcards

I actually started this process by dealing with the implications for postcards, since they're one of the most uniform patterns in Ushahidi (e.g. title, description, metadata) -- and making surveys "free-form" would require that they be much more fluid.

Again, the fields displayed in postcards can be one, three, or all of those that are used in the complete form. The UX encourages only displaying two or three, though. The fields that are displayed in postcards can also be positioned in any order the deployer wants -- not necessarily the same order they appear in the complete form.

Finally, the first field (if it's text) is always displayed in a larger font size. If it includes multiple paragraphs, only the first one is treated in that larger size.

So here are some examples of some postcards. Hopefully, the things that remain consistent and fixed are obvious.

Postcard for a survey with a short-text field in the first position, long-text in the second, and an image in the third...

Postcard for a survey with long text as the only visible field...

Postcard for a survey with an image in the first position and long text in the second...

Postcard for a survey showing four fields...

---

Thanks for your feedback and questions, y'all.

[jshorland]

@brandonrosage something charlie brought up that i think we deliberately eliminated in the transition to mustang is help text. We don't have a way for deployers to provide any context or instructional text alongside their custom fields. Ex: In my deployment, ushaverse.ushahidi.io, I added instructions to a survey field as the default text. A contributor has to manually delete that in order to fill it in, making it tedious to fill in fields. Do you think there is a place/compelling argument to re-integrate this back in?

[caharding]

One thing I've found to be a problem about this solution is the continued use of the up/down arrow to reposition questions. It can be very slow and difficult to add a field at the bottom you want to appear on top. Could there also be a click/drag solution?

Jess plus 1's this.

[caharding]

I'm actually also confused about why the Desc/Title field are still treated in a unique way upon survey creation. Are they still a standard entity or not?

[caharding]

A couple things:

1. You're going to need to be able to hide/collapse all Surveys or Data Sources for screen real estate
2. I think that what goes in the "Preview" card should be chosen not on the field, but in the preview mode, where the user can then drop down select which field they want in what order. It is confusing that they would have to reorder the survey if they want to reorder the preview in the current solution.
3. This image's buttons take up too much space, they should simply read "Respond" "Assign" "Show" "Hide" "Edit"
   

[justinscherer]

@caharding @jrtricafort this should get sorted in the UI refresh.

[Erioldoesdesign]

Wow Okay theres a lot of history here! and I also see that this issue got away from it's original purpose of 'Free form surveys' so it should have really had multiple issues raised for each of the talking points... (from my pov)

Many of the visually confusing elements are solved in the UI refresh, but the interactions the user makes are still overly complex. However, we did implement a better way for moving elements around that isn't up/down arrows in the FE! I just can't find the issue...

I also don't think we eliminated things like mandatory title/description.