Coda has become the backbone of our Management Consultancy but I’m not sure if it’s possible to adapt Coda for our latest use case…
We’ve just created a new remote diagnostic tool to send to clients. Our client would circulate the survey link internally. Upon opening the survey, each respondant first selects (from pre-defined drop downs) their role in the organisation (e.g. C-suite, GM, HOD, superintendant etc.) and their function (department). The survey has a total of 180 questions. Each question is assigned to roles and functions so the questions shown to each respondant need to be dynamic. There are too many unique role and function combinations for this to be hard coded.
Our clients (respondants) do not have Coda accounts and therefore will not be logged in.
The question set evolves over time or is sometimes edited to fit a specific client’s situation so needs to be pulled in from a master question set for each new client. Each question is currently a row in a table as the questions related to other two internal models that we report against which is where Coda comes in.
Each question is a likert scale response (strongly disagree to strongly agree) but each question also requires a free form text response should the respondant have additional comments.
I don’t think Coda Forms is powerful enough (yet) to handle the complexity of this problem and if it is I’m not sure how to approach it. I thought a filtered table view might work but that would require respondants to log in (not an option).
Would an intergration with a tool like Typeform be able to overcome the challenges? Has anybody tried anything like this before? How would the community approach or solve this problem?
Your best bet would definitely be looking into Typeform and other form services that integrate with Coda to see what fits you best!
Technically you could achieve what you’re looking for by only using Coda, but the time and complexity just wouldn’t be worth it.
Even if you use an outside service to sync into Coda, it’s likely all 180 questions would be there own column which might reduce performance quite a bit. Might be worth seeing if you can break the form into multiple sections.
If you would still like to connect Coda to this system and have it handle the data, use its AI features for summaries and pass that data to your main hub you can use Webflow.
You can use TypeForm of course but you can have more granular control if you build something simple in Webflow. Both have their advantages.
Utilising Webflow you can use the Webflow pack to easily feed data from Webflow to Coda and vice versa using automations.
You can then create:
Dynamic form pages based on your question sets.
Offer the form without the need to login.
Utilise coda to summarise, organise and view the data.
Save $$$ because I know typeform can be pricey for some companies.
Provide a fun UX as you have the ability to add simple animations and tracking data / analytics.
Essentially, you track users inputs in a published doc either via webhooks (which feed the info back to your source Coda doc) or query parameters that are then passed to a 1 question form.
With the amount of questions you have, I’d do the webhook route (the Coda webhook pack specifically supports this with one of its formulas called published webhook )
Depending on your current comfortability with Coda, automations, and webhooks I could see you using either the Advanced form style with webhooks or something more built for this like typeform.
I liked the Coda Quiz approach as we could potentiall have two drop down filters above the table that for role and function which would keep it clean but I’m unsure how the webhook approach fits in?
Could you please elaborate on how the webhook approach might work in this use case?
Just to close this out and if anybody is looking do something similar in the future…
I had a look into all of the solutions posted so thank you to everyone that jumped in with suggestions!
When I got further into this, I realised we had almost 200 questions broken up into 13 unique combinations of roles and functions ranging from 43 questions for those closer to the coal face to 100+ question for those at a board level. That’s just the Likert ratings, each question has a free text input option if our survey respondents felt particularly strongly about any question and wanted to provide more input. This was becoming unwieldy quickly especially as the question set evolved during an internal review process
I followed up on @Harry_Roper’s offer to chat and we discussed how to approach this using Webflow and the free Webflow Coda pack. Given the time difference I went to bed thinking that was the best way forward only to woke up to an even more elegant solution in my inbox.
@Harry_Roper created a proof of concept Doc that would allow us to use filters on our existing table and have a free form text input option displayed in a detailed table view. This accessibility and integration with Coda was the best possible outcome. The only draw back is it requires people to log in to Coda. It was originally a requirement that they NOT log in but given the time, cost and complexity to build this out any other way we have decided to make this more of a nice to have for now whilst we ‘fail fast’ with our prototype. This solution would be perfect if Coda could allow users not logged in to edit documents…
@Harry_Roper perhaps you want to embed the proof of concept doc you created here?
For anyone looking to create on page form systems that are dynamic use the doc below.
How this works:
User uses the on page selects to pre-filter the question list. You can see this happening when you click CEO + Technician.
User then goes through the project detail view filling out questions. These are saved in real time to the table.
Extras: You can either re-create this doc for each participant or if you want to go a one step further you could use the generate button I have left in the doc for you to generate new table rows so that each users answer is unique.
