Hi,
I have a customer that requires a true spreadsheet/paper form grid in Survey 123.
I need to implement a Survey 123 digital form for species data collection. I'm trying to recreate the Carolina Vegetation Survey Level 5 species form (see attachment) and (separately) the Virginia Natural Heritage Program data collection protocols.
Each of these workflows depend on the ability of the data collector (i.e., the human) being able to visually review several dozens (or more) of species records in the same screen (with scrolling allowed).
Further (and related to the above), each species requires that several questions be answered. These questions (particularly on the CVS Level 5 form) are not completely filled out species by species (row by row), but are typically filled out question by question (column by column).
Defining a Survey 123 repeat does not meet this need since you can only see one species at a time. Imagine having 70 species in the list (which did occur on one of my samples). Say that you're on species 70 and you need to return to species 1 to answer the next "column" of questions. Are you really going to have the data collector click the form's "left/previous" button 69 times to get back to species 1? And what happens if you need to answer the questions non-sequentially?
Survey 123's repeat is just not the right UI structure to support this workflow.
I've heard of this similar need from multiple conservation organizations. They have separately described prior attempts by experienced developers using Survey 123 (and other software) who have built what turn out to be unusable/impractical digital forms, primarily due to the developer not understanding the workflow of the data collector and the need to see all of the species/questions at once.
Each of these organizations prefer to collect data by hand and hand transcribe their forms because it is faster and simpler than trying to use a "repeat" style digital form that hides 99% of the data.
There's gotta be a way to address this.
