Let’s start by understanding what rich text is J. Rich text is the ability to add formatting to text. Things like bold, colors, underline, different fonts and sizes of texts. Rich text is all around us in the internet and on MS Word documents, PDF files etc.. However, Windows Mobile PDA applications (other than Pocket Word) usually don’t have this support.
So, is showing Rich text on the PDA important when conducting mobile surveys? I think the answer is a definite “Yes”. It can be very useful when you have a field surveyor using a PDA to conduct a survey and in the question text it says: “would you recommend product A to your close friends?”
This is also useful when you are requesting that the surveyed person will fill out a question by him/her self instead of having the surveyor read the question out loud. You can then highlight certain words, use different colors or different font sizes to make the necessary modifications that are needed in the research. This of course is also important for the answer text as well.
Here is a screenshot of how Rich text can look on the PDA:
Rich text in mobile surveys
Would you agree that this is an important capability to have in a mobile surveys software? I think it is. Let me know what your thoughts are on this subject.
The next version of SurveyToGo – a Mobile Surveys Software, will support RTF (Rich Text) questions and answer colors and formatting. Be sure to check it out when it is released!
Tags: field data collection, mobile survey, Mobile surveys, PDA forms, pda quistionnaires, pda survey, PDA surveys, questionnaires, survey software
