🐾 How to create a 3-in-1 app to crowdsource data, perform analytics, and share stories

Hey there,

Welcome back to The Monthly with All That Geo by me, Cristina. Each month I bring you a new learning experience on geospatial data visualisation, analysis and storytelling.

In this issue:

• How to create a 3-in-1 app to crowdsource data, perform analytics, and share stories

🐾  How to create a 3-in-1 app to crowdsource data, analyse results, and share stories

A few months ago, I dedicated myself to a special pet project (pun intended): I wanted to share my dog Frenchy's life story with others.

But, you know, there are so many touching stories about greyhounds out there...

So, in addition to sharing Frenchy's story, I thought about a way I could collect other greyhound stories and showcase them. I wanted to create a web page where greyhound owners could add their dog's stories and meet other greyhounds.

All in one app, if possible!

And then I thought: how cool would it be if there were some analytics to detect trends amongst those dogs' behaviours?

Well, I admit, a bit too ambitious for just one app. But I wanted a one-stop app for greyhound stories so that people wouldn't have to access different apps, whether they were submitting stories or meeting other greyhounds. In other words, I wanted to maximise the user experience when visiting the web page.

The risk was that the app would look messy and unusable.

But first things first. I knew that I had to start with a survey to collect those stories. Then, I would be able to show the results in the form of a dashboard (you can tell stories with dashboards, too 😉). Finally, I knew I had to be mindful of the user interface since all these items were to show. And that was the trickiest part since dashboards usually look bad on mobile...

That's when I found a way to make the dashboard look great in every screen size: by using the Experience Builder 🙌

So, in this tutorial, I'm sharing the step-by-step workflow I followed to build a 3-in-1 web app that allows for crowdsourcing data, performing analytics and sharing stories while looking good on both desktop and mobile.

Put your greyhound on the map

🤔 But Cristina, how can this kind of 3-in-1 web app be helpful to me?

• You want to collect data from users, visualise their submissions and perform analytics on the fly, sharing just one URL.  
• You are researching a particular topic that requires crowdsourced data, and you want to monitor the submissions in real time.
• You want to ensure your dashboard shows correctly on every screen size.

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See you next month!

Take care and keep learning,

Cristina | All That Geo

P.S. Missed the last newsletter?  I wrote about How to build a 3D hiking app. Read it here.