Developing GIS tools with branching workflows and multiple levels of sub-steps has become relatively easy. Writing detailed directions for how to use them, however, remains difficult. Printed directions may start out beside the keyboard for ready reference, but often get buried under desktop detritus. Paging through a lengthy paper document is inconvenient at best and unrealistic if the goal is for a user to follow them step-by-step like a pilot running through a pre-flight checklist. And sometimes that is exactly how we want users to work. Digital directions provide a modern, intuitive, heads-up alternative to instructions written on paper. Web capabilities like hyperlinks, tabs, pages, and collapsible content vastly improve the user experience by providing easy access to specific information that is needed and hiding everything else that is not. Unfortunately, that usually requires web programming skills or acquiring and learning additional software. Fortunately, Survey123 has all these capabilities and is already available to most GIS users. Survey123 was created to ask users questions and collect their answers – reversing this flow of information is quite easy. In this presentation, I will show you how I used Survey123 Connect to build step-by-step, “click-along” directions for a complicated data entry workflow.
