Barcodes, Signatures, and Ranking Coming Soon to Magpi!

Three New Question Types — with More to Come!

We’re very pleased to announce that over the course of 2017 we’ll be adding a wide variety of useful new question types for use with the Magpi mobile data collection app, with three new question types coming in just about one month. In this post we’ll discuss the new question types that will be released first with sketches (“mockups”) of the new features to give you an idea of what they’ll look like.

Mockup of signature question

Signature Questions

In May we’ll be releasing signature questions, which allow you to sign your name on the screen of the mobile device with your finger, and save the signature as an image file.

Barcode Questions

QR code for www.magpi.com

By popular request, Magpi will soon be adding barcode questions, to enable users to scan a variety of barcodes, including the older UPC codes as well as more modern QR codes.

Later in the year, we’ll add “dynamic lookup” to enable you to retrieve information from a lookup table after scanning a barcode.

Drag-and-Drop Ranking Questions

Ranking question

With the assistance of Magpi users DanChurchAid, we’re adding a drag-and-drop ranking question. This will enable you to specify a list of options, as in any multiple choice question, but rather than selecting one option (as in a radio button question) or “all that apply” (as in a checkbox question), the user will drag and drop the options into a rank order.

In the example shown at right (click the image to enlarge), there are five options. After dragging into order, Magpi will store a number from 1 to 5 for each of the options, with the most highly ranked one being assigned a “5” (n, the number of options) and the least important being assigned a “1”. The dataset for this question will look like this:

More to Come

This is just a taste of what’s to come in 2017, so stay tuned!

Originally published at Magpi.