Development Seed Blog

Simple Forms Increase Data Submission Rates

As Eric mentioned in his post last week about the Pandemic Preparedness mapping project, we spent a lot of time limiting the complexity on the data entry side of the site. We needed something clean and easy to use that still ensures that all the needed information is collected from the public health organizations using the form. We spent a good amount time tweaking the data entry forms themselves to try and streamline the data entry process. I pulled together a short screencast to show how a good data entry process can work, specifically looking at the provincial drilldown widget that allows users to easily geotag their content.

Since I'm sure other folks working with large taxonomies are also struggling to make their data entry forms simpler and more user friendly, I wanted to share more detail on how I built this. It's entirely javascript, and though it took a bit of time it works in IE 6 and 7, as well as the more reasonable browsers out there like Firefox and Safari. Aside from normal cross browser testing, we also tested it to make sure it could handle large numbers of terms. I built the initial widget with a set of test data with just a dozen or so terms, and it worked great, but once I imported the full region/country/province list into Drupal, the widget needed to be fully reworked.

In its current state, the widget is fairly tailored to the particular kind of hierarchy that this site needed, but there is some starter code in my sandbox for people that want to try something similar on their own. Please beware that it will most certainly need some modifications to work in other sites.