Building your form

The form editor shows your survey as a working form and lets you change it by clicking on it. You write the questions where they will be read, in the order people will answer them.

Table of contents

1. Building your form
   1. Opening the form editor
      1. The toolbar
   2. Selecting what you want to change
   3. Editing the name and the description
   4. Adding, moving and removing questions
      1. Questions you can’t remove
   5. Saving your work
   6. Editing the notification email

Opening the form editor

1. Navigate to your team dashboard.
2. Click on the card of the survey you want to edit to open its dashboard.
3. Press the Form editor button.

Only people with rights to edit the survey can change it.

The editor has four parts:

1. The heading shows the survey name, the breadcrumbs that lead back to your dashboard, and the save button.
2. The form preview in the middle is your survey. It’s the same form contributors fill in, with your description at the top and your questions below it.
3. The properties panel on the right shows what you selected: one question, or the survey itself when nothing is selected.
4. The toolbar at the bottom switches the properties panel between two tools.

The toolbar

The toolbar has two tools:

• Content is for building your survey: the questions, their settings and the settings of the survey. It’s the tool you start in, and everything on this page is done with it.
• Translate is for writing your questions in other languages. See Translating a survey.

The selected tool is highlighted.

You can make the preview wider or narrower by dragging the border between the preview and the properties panel. The form re-arranges itself the way it would on a screen of that width, so you can check how your questions look on a phone before you publish them.

Selecting what you want to change

Click a question in the preview and the properties panel shows its settings. Click an empty spot outside the questions and the selection is cleared, so the panel goes back to the settings of the survey.

You don’t need to hit the question exactly: a click anywhere inside it selects the whole question.

Editing the name and the description

The name and the description of your survey are edited straight in the preview, not in a panel:

• double click the title to rename the survey, then press Enter to keep the new name or Escape to drop it
• click the description underneath to edit the article that explains your project

The name you type is also what the heading of the editor shows, so you can see right away what your contributors will read.

Adding, moving and removing questions

Select a question and four buttons appear around it:

• + above the question adds a new question before it
• + below the question adds a new question after it
• the handle on the left moves the question
• the bin in the corner removes the question, or an eye if the question is one that can only be hidden

A new question starts as a short text question called New question, ready for you to write over.

To move a question, press the handle and hold it for a moment until the question lifts, then drag it where you want it and let go. A line shows where it will land. Questions move only inside their own list, so a question about the place can’t end up among the questions about the contributor.

Questions you can’t remove

Seven questions are part of every survey and have no bin button. They are the ones the platform itself needs: each one fills in a field of the place that gets added to your map, or tells you who sent the answer. A survey that deleted them would collect text nobody could turn into a site, so instead of removing them you hide them with the eye button in the corner, and bring them back with the same button.

The questions about the place are:

Question	What it fills in
position	where the place is
name	what the place is called
description	what the place is
icons	which icons the place gets, and with them the questions its icons ask
pictures	the photos of the place
sounds	the recordings of the place

The question about the person answering is email, which is how your team reaches the contributor.

Hiding one is the normal thing to do when it doesn’t fit your project: hide sounds for a survey about bike racks, or email for one you want answered anonymously. The question keeps its place and its wording, it’s just not asked. What you can’t do is get rid of it, so a later survey can use it again.

Everything else you add yourself, and those questions have a bin. Read more about all of them in Questions and their types.

Saving your work

Nothing is sent to the platform while you type. The Save button in the heading wakes up as soon as something changes, and one press saves everything you changed: the questions, the description, the cover and the settings.

If you try to leave the editor with unsaved changes, you are asked to confirm first.

Your survey isn’t saved until you press that save button. Close the tab before you do, and your carefully worded questions go where all unasked questions go: nowhere.

Editing the notification email

If your survey sends a notification when an answer arrives, an envelope button shows up in the heading. It opens the article that the notification email is written in, so you can change what your team receives. The notification itself is switched on and off from the answers settings.