Creating or Importing Surveys

With MyDataHelps Designer's visual survey builder, you can create a variety of surveys, such as electronic patient-reported outcomes (ePROs), clinician-reported outcomes (ClinROs), and use ResearchKit Active Tasks to collect data from their phone's sensors.

Creating a Survey

Most projects will involve several surveys. After joining a workspace and creating a project, a default enrollment survey is added and you will be able to create or import other surveys.

MyDataHelps Designer's survey editor lets you build rich surveys. To get started, this guide will show you how to create a simple survey for a hypothetical sleep project.

From the Create or Import Survey dashboard, enter a survey name of "Sleep Time" and click "Add Survey." This brings up the survey editor.

Select "Add Step" to add a new step to the survey. Our first step will just contain some introductory instructions, so we'll use the "Instruction Step" type.

Select the "+" button next to the step preview to add a second step. This step will query for how many hours of sleep the participant got last night, so use the "Question Step" type. For the answer format, you could leave it open-ended with a "Numeric" answer, or provide a more graphical sliding scale with the "Scale (Discrete)" type.

Once you're finished adding steps, click "Save and Publish" to publish the survey.

Testing the Survey

You can get a quick preview of the survey in a browser by clicking the "Try It Out" button to try the entire survey, or you can click the eye icon next to the current step you're viewing to try the survey from there. You can also click the drop-down next to the button or icon to view the survey as a particular participant.

Some survey steps require device input or advanced features, and can only be tested through the MyDataHelps app. See Testing Projects and Surveys for advanced testing options.

Importing a Survey

Instead of starting from scratch, you can leverage an existing template by importing a survey from the survey library. These surveys have been created and shared by others. You can re-use one wholesale or use it as a starting point and then customize it. For more information, see Importing and Sharing Surveys. 

Adding eConsent

A project can have as many surveys as you want, but typically, projects will include eConsent as part of their enrollment survey, which the default sample enrollment survey does. eConsent is used to inform participants about what data is collected and how it will be used. The enrollment survey is presented to new users before they join a project, and effectively serves as a gate to accessing other surveys.