Are you ready to connect? With ArcGIS Survey123, it’s as easy as 1-2-3!

September 11, 2024

Chris Harlow

Love them or hate them, surveys are universally recognized, understood and used. Let’s connect with our users to build smart forms for better decisions.

We live in a connected world where data is consumed and analyzed continuously. Complex decisions are constantly being made, sometimes even autonomously. Leveraging a geographic component only enhances the understanding and decision-making process.

Let’s look at a real-world example: home automation. You can tell your smartphone to lock the door or turn off the lights. You could set up an automation that runs every night at 8 p.m. to lock the doors. Or take it one step further and have a process to validate your location via your phone and then, based on the time of day, lock (or unlock) the doors and turn the lights off (or on). Data really does drive decision-making and understanding these days.

Now, whether you’re trying to automate your life at home, quickly understand the extent of damage from an ongoing natural disaster, trace and mitigate public health issues of concern, collaboratively plan urban infrastructure, or follow the fascinating migration of caribou, you’ll need to capture data. An excellent means of gathering the relevant information is by asking questions. Surveys are lists of questions devised to collect information suitable for decision-making and action in any industry.

Getting to the point, ArcGIS Survey123 connects your data to the end users. Data gathered through surveys can help you answer your targeted questions. You can collect data flexibly and easily using smart forms, which give you the added ability to calculate fields, consume conditional logic, support multiple languages and even set default values to ensure that you’re getting information you can trust so you can make a difference.

1-2-3

ArcGIS Survey123 was originally developed by Esri back in 2015 as a versatile tool for form-centric data collection workflows. Since then, it’s been continually updated and enhanced, resulting in today’s advanced survey authoring and completion suite. The end-to-end philosophy of Survey123 is reflected in the name: (1) provide everything needed to create surveys, (2) get answers and (3) analyze results.

Create surveys: You have two options for authoring smart forms using Survey123: via ArcGIS Survey123 Connect and the web designer. Both authoring options allow you to collect information about people, events, infrastructure and more.
Get answers: Your target users can complete surveys in the field app, the web app or both. It’s a convenient, flexible way to collect information, whether a user is on the go, offline, on mobile or desktop devices, or working in a web browser. Survey123 easily plugs into business workflows, even ones involving multiple surveys and multiple users.
Analyze results: Sharing the survey results makes your new data useful across your organization. You and your team can inspect the records and visualize data to understand trends and inform decisions. The Survey123 website includes built-in dashboards, report services and automation options that allow you to integrate Survey123 data into third-party systems (e.g., email, SMS, or databases).

Create surveys, get answers and analyze results with ArcGIS Survey123, Esri’s powerful, spatially-enabled survey application.

Ready, set, connect

ArcGIS Survey123 enables you to connect with devices and location providers (e.g. IP lookup, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth beacons, cellular network, external GNSS receivers). It also connects data with end users. “Connect” is also part of the name of the robust desktop application that you can download and install to create truly smart forms. Survey123 Connect is a powerful component offering several beneficial features:

Full control with the XLSForm standard, including advanced logic, calculations and custom styling
Complex functionality, supporting cascading selects, repeats and nested groups
Template management, for creating and sharing consistency across your organization
Offline capabilities, working in remote areas
Integration with ArcGIS, making it seamless with other ArcGIS tools
More question types when comparing with the web designer; see the documentation

As you expand your use of this ArcGIS technology, you may want to tap into advanced ways of connecting with your users and data. For example, when you author your smart forms, you can take advantage of URL parameters and related records.

URL parameters in ArcGIS Survey123 dynamically pass data into your survey forms, making them more efficient and tailored to your needs. These allow you to prepopulate questions with automatic values, hide questions based on answers to previous questions, change the language, combine multiple parameters and customize the URL scheme to integrate with other mobile applications. That’s some serious streamlining for smartening up your smart forms that your end users will certainly appreciate.

Related records are integral to many organizations, such as routine data collection for maintenance inspections or updating records with frequently changing attributes. Using related records in ArcGIS Survey123 can enhance your data collection by allowing you to create a relationship class between different datasets. The related records will be populated based on the relationships you defined.

Of course, there’s always more to explore. This is just the start of using surveys to unlock your doors and turn on your lights! Are you ready to connect smart forms and GIS with ArcGIS Survey123 to digitally transform your data collection workflows?

Resources

See the following resources to learn more about working with questions to get the right answers in ArcGIS Survey123:

Want to dive deep into the details with ArcGIS Survey123 Connect? Check out our upcoming instructor-led course on the topic, which includes two days of live instructor lessons as well as exercises to get you conversant quickly.

Want to stay informed about all the latest training opportunities at Esri Canada? Visit Esri Canada’s Communication Preference Centre and select the “Training” checkbox to get a monthly roundup straight to your inbox.