SurveyKit: Create beautiful surveys on Android (inspired by ResearchKit Surveys on iOS)

Do you want to display a questionnaire to get the opinion of your users? A survey for a medical trial? A series of instructions in a manual-like style?
SurveyKit is an Android library that allows you to create exactly that.

Thematically it is built to provide a feeling of a professional research survey. The library aims to be visually clean, lean and easily configurable. We aim to keep the functionality close to iOS ResearchKit Surveys.

This is an early version and work in progress. Do not hesitate to give feedback, ideas or improvements via an issue.

Examples

Flow

Screenshots

📚 Overview: Creating Research Surveys

• What SurveyKit does for you
• What SurveyKit does not (yet) do for you
• Library Setup
  • Add the repository
  • Add the dependency
• Usage
  • Add and find the survey in the xml
  • Create survey steps
  • Create a Task
  • Evaluate the results
  • Configure
  • Start the survey
• Location steps
• Custom steps
• Comparison to ResearchKit on iOS
• Author
• Contributing
• License

What SurveyKit does for you

• Simplifies the creation of surveys
• Provides rich animations and transitions out of the box (custom animations planned)
• Build with a consistent, lean, simple style, to fit research purposes
• Survey navigation can be linear or based on a decision tree (directed graph)
• Gathers results and provides them in a convinient manner to the developer for further use
• Gives you complete freedom on creating your own questions
• Allows you to customize the style
• Provides an API and structure that is very similar to iOS ResearchKit Surveys
• Is used in production by Quickbird Studios

What SurveyKit does not (yet) do for you

As stated before, this is an early version and a work in progress. We aim to extend this library until it matches the functionality of the iOS ResearchKit Surveys.

🏃 Library Setup

All of the available versions of SurveyKit has been moved to MavenCentral.

1. Add the repository

SurveyKit is now available via MavenCentral which is normally added as part of every new Android project. However, if it is not present, you can add it as show here.

allprojects {
    repositories {
        mavenCentral()
    }
}

2. Add the dependency

build.gradle.kts

dependencies {
    implementation(project("com.quickbirdstudios:surveykit:1.1.0"))
}

Find the latest version or all releases

💻 Usage

Example

A working example project can be found HERE

Add and Find the Survey in the XML

Add the SurveyView to your xml (it looks best if it fills the screen).

<com.quickbirdstudios.survey_kit.survey.SurveyView
    android:id="@+id/survey_view"
    android:layout_width="match_parent"
    android:layout_height="match_parent" />

Find the view in the xml and save it for further use.

var surveyView: SurveyView = view.findViewById(R.id.survey_view)

Create survey steps

To create a step, create an instance of one of these 3 classes:

InstructionStep

InstructionStep(
    title = R.string.intro_title,
    text = R.string.intro_text,
    buttonText = R.string.intro_start
)

The title is the general title of the Survey you want to conduct.
The text is, in this case, the introduction text which should give an introduction, about what the survey is about.
The buttonText specifies the text of the button, which will start the survey. All of these properties have to be resource Ids.

CompletionStep

CompletionStep(
    title = R.string.finish_question_title,
    text = R.string.finish_question_text,
    buttonText = R.string.finish_question_submit
)

The title is the general title of the Survey you want to conduct, same as for the InstructionStep.
The text is here should be something motivational: that the survey has been completed successfully.
The buttonText specifies the text of the button, which will end the survey. All of these properties have to be resource Ids.

QuestionStep

QuestionStep(
    title = R.string.about_you_question_title,
    text = R.string.about_you_question_text,
    answerFormat = AnswerFormat.TextAnswerFormat(
        multipleLines = true,
        maximumLength = 100
    )
)

The title same as for the InstructionStep and CompletionStep.
The text the actual question you want to ask. Depending on the answer type of this, you should set the next property.
The answerFormat specifies the type of question (the type of answer to the question) you want to ask. Currently there these types supported:

• TextAnswerFormat
• IntegerAnswerFormat
• ScaleAnswerFormat
• SingleChoiceAnswerFormat
• MultipleChoiceAnswerFormat
• LocationAnswerFormat

All that's left is to collect your steps in a list.

val steps = listOf(step1, step2, step3, ...)

Create a Task

Next you need a task. Each survey has exactly one task. A Task is used to define how the user should navigate through your steps.

OrderedTask

val task = OrderedTask(steps = steps)

The OrderedTask just presents the questions in order, as they are given.

NavigableOrderedTask

val task = NavigableOrderedTask(steps = steps)

The NavigableOrderedTask allows you to specify navigation rules.
There are two types of navigation rules:
With the DirectStepNavigationRule you say that after this step, another specified step should follow.

task.setNavigationRule(
    steps[4].id,
    NavigationRule.DirectStepNavigationRule(
        destinationStepStepIdentifier = steps[6].id
    )
)

With the MultipleDirectionStepNavigationRule you can specify the next step, depending on the answer of the step.

task.setNavigationRule(
    steps[6].id,
    NavigationRule.MultipleDirectionStepNavigationRule(
        resultToStepIdentifierMapper = { input ->
            when (input) {
                "Yes" -> steps[7].id
                "No" -> steps[0].id
                else -> null
            }
        }
    )
)

Evaluate the results

When the survey is finished, you get a callback. No matter of the FinishReason, you always get all results gathered until now.
The TaskResult contains a list of StepResults. The StepResult contains a list of QuestionResults.

surveyView.onSurveyFinish = { taskResult: TaskResult, reason: FinishReason ->
    if (reason == FinishReason.Completed) {
        taskResult.results.forEach { stepResult ->
            Log.e("logTag", "answer ${stepResult.results.firstOrNull()}")
        }
    }
}

Style

These is how you add custom styling to your survey. We'll add even more options in the future.

val configuration = SurveyTheme(
    themeColorDark = ContextCompat.getColor(requireContext(), R.color.cyan_dark),
    themeColor = ContextCompat.getColor(requireContext(), R.color.cyan_normal),
    textColor = ContextCompat.getColor(requireContext(), R.color.cyan_text)
)

Start the survey

All that's left is to start the survey and enjoy.🎉🎊

surveyView.start(task, configuration)

Cancel Survey dialog

When you cancel the survey, there is an option to change dialog default Strings. Must be imported from resources.

val configuration = SurveyTheme(
            themeColorDark = ContextCompat.getColor(this, R.color.cyan_dark),
            themeColor = ContextCompat.getColor(this, R.color.cyan_normal),
            textColor = ContextCompat.getColor(this, R.color.cyan_text),
            abortDialogConfiguration = AbortDialogConfiguration(
                title = R.string.title,
                message = R.string.message,
                neutralMessage = R.string.no,
                negativeMessage = R.string.yes
            )
        )

📍 Location steps

You need add below to your own application AndroidManifest.xml file to use Google Map.

  <meta-data
    android:name="com.google.android.gms.version"
    android:value="@integer/google_play_services_version" />

  <meta-data
    android:name="com.google.android.maps.v2.API_KEY"
    android:value="GOOGLE API KEY" />

Also need to append location permissions on AndroidManifest.xml. This is not required. But If you gave this permissions, map can select current location automatically.

    <uses-permission android:name="android.permission.ACCESS_COARSE_LOCATION" />
    <uses-permission android:name="android.permission.ACCESS_FINE_LOCATION" />

You might wanna run location question steps test or example app on this project. Need to add api keys on local.properties file.

google_sdk_key="[API_KEY]"
//if you want to use yandex address suggession on example app
yandex_sdk_key="[API_KEY]"

And finally you can instante location question step like below.

QuestionStep(
    title = "title",
    text = this.resources.getString(R.string.location_question_text),
    lifecycle = lifecycle,
    answerFormat = AnswerFormat.LocationAnswerFormat(
                    lifecycle = lifecycle,
                    //addressProvider = YandexAddressSuggestionProvider(api_key)
                )
    )

Default address provider is GeocoderAddressSuggestionProvider based on android.location.Geocoder. If you want to use custom address provider. You can use AddressSuggestionProvider interface and make your own implements like YandexAddressSuggestionProvider.

📇 Custom steps

At some point, you might wanna define your own custom question steps. That could, for example, be a question which prompts the user to pick color values or even sound samples. These are not implemented yet but you can easily create them yourself:

You'll need a CustomResult and a CustomStep. The Result class tells SurveyKit which data you want to save.

@Parcelize
data class CustomResult(
    val customData: String,
    override val stringIdentifier: String,
    override val id: Identifier,
    override val startDate: Date,
    override var endDate: Date
) : QuestionResult, Parcelable

Next you'll need a CustomStep class:

class CustomStep : Step {
    override val isOptional: Boolean = true
    override val id: StepIdentifier = StepIdentifier()
    val tmp = id

    override fun createView(context: Context, stepResult: StepResult?): StepView {
        return object : StepView(context, id, isOptional) {

            override fun setupViews() = Unit

            val root = View.inflate(context, R.layout.example, this)

            override fun createResults(): QuestionResult =
                CustomResult(
                    root.findViewById<EditText>(R.id.input).text.toString(),
                    "stringIdentifier",
                    id,
                    Date(),
                    Date()
                )

            override fun isValidInput(): Boolean = this@CustomStep.isOptional

            override var isOptional: Boolean = this@CustomStep.isOptional
            override val id: StepIdentifier = tmp

            override fun style(surveyTheme: SurveyTheme) {
                // do styling here
            }

            init {
                root.findViewById<Button>(R.id.continue)
                    .setOnClickListener { onNextListener(createResults()) }
                root.findViewById<Button>(R.id.back)
                    .setOnClickListener { onBackListener(createResults()) }
                root.findViewById<Button>(R.id.close)
                    .setOnClickListener { onCloseListener(createResults(), FinishReason.Completed) }
                root.findViewById<Button>(R.id.skip)
                    .setOnClickListener { onSkipListener() }
                root.findViewById<EditText>(R.id.input).setText(
                    (stepResult?.results?.firstOrNull() as? CustomResult)?.customData ?: ""
                )
            }
        }
    }
}

🍏vs🤖 : Comparison of SurveyKit on Android to ResearchKit on iOS

This is an overview of which features iOS ResearchKit Surveys provides and which ones are already supported by SurveyKit on Android. The goal is to make both libraries match in terms of their functionality.

👤 Author

This Android library is created with ❤️ by QuickBird Studios.

❤️ Contributing

Open an issue if you need help, if you found a bug, or if you want to discuss a feature request.

Open a PR if you want to make changes to SurveyKit.

For the moment, a mandatory requirement for a PR to be accepted is also applying ktlint when submitting this PR.

📃 License

SurveyKit is released under an MIT license. See License for more information.