The ODK checker dashboard: how to quickly check your form design!

Medair has recently developed the ODK checker dashboard, a Qlik Sense dashboard designed to quickly check an ODK form design (xls or xlsx format) against a list of quality standards and common manual errors.

This tool can be used either to drive improvements in form design quality or to speed up the approval process for experienced staff who produce high quality forms but who face time limitations due to the demand for IM tools.

Why use a dashboard to help quality check ODK forms before publication?

Speed of Verification

The dashboard loads in the excel template and within a few seconds can highlight missing constraints, hints, translations and other manual errors which occur when trying to create forms within deadlines.  While tools such as ODK validate will search for technical errors, they normally only find the first error, meaning they need to be used several times to find all the problems. They also do not look for design errors such as missing constraint messages.  In Medair, it normally saves 30 – 60 minutes per form.

Standardisation of Quality

The dashboard allows you to choose the design checks which you consider relevant to your projects and encourages all IM staff to create ODK forms to the same standard.  The front end interface can be adapted without much difficulty allowing the possibility of distributing a version with customisations which reflect the checks required in your organisation / sector.  The time savings of the dashboard create an incentive for each project in to apply the same quality standards.

 

Implementation & Support

The dashboard template and implementation guidance can be found via the following link: https://im.medair.org/#Public/Filemanager/folder/396

This tool was presented during the 2018 GeOnG Forum during a workshop on “Data collection: A bit less cleaning, a bit more quality” conducted by CartONG & Medair. More information here: http://cartong.org/geong/2018/workshops

If you would like to implement the tool in your organisation or to request further information about the tool, please feel free to contact the author of this blog post Noel O’Boyle, Information Support Manager at Medair, at: noel.oboyle@medair.org

If you need help to design MDC forms, we encourage you to also read our blog post on “Mobile data collection: more quality, less cleaning!“. The purpose of this second blog post is to serve as checklist providing humanitarian and development actors with the necessary reminders, on the technical and methodological aspects, to keep data cleaning to a minimum!