How to describe our resources in terms of difficulty, complexity and time to digest?
The infinite monkey theorem states that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter keyboard for an infinite amount of time will almost surely type a given text, such as the complete works of William Shakespeare.
You don't have an infinite amount of time to write your survey and hopefully your keystrokes will be less random than that of a monkey, so the time it will take you should be significantly less than infinity.
We have provided many resources to help you write your survey: blogs, samples, templates and documentation. Identifying which of these suits which users is as a challenge. Saying something is easy or difficult, alienates as many people as it helps.
Borrowing from (and bending) the infinite monkey theorem, we have chosen a classification scale to describe our content. If the goal is a survey (rather than the complete works of Shakespeare), and you have a computer and some sustenance - in this case bananas - you can build your survey. The question is how many bananas?
Every monkey needs to eat, and depending on how difficult / complex / time consuming a task is, more sustenance is required. Here is our banana rating for our Survey123 resources:
- One banana means you want to create a survey by clicking a few buttons and drag and dropping things in a window. The web is all you want to use, and your survey doesn't need calculations or complex relationships between questions.
- Two bananas means that you’re comfortable using Survey123 Connect, and making a more involved survey. You’re ready to implement more complex questions, some visual customization, and even include some simple relevant expressions and calculations. Your survey is still possible on paper, but in Survey123 it’s sharper and easier to use.
- Three bananas means that you’re creating surveys too complex for a paper form (or possible, but incredibly tedious). You might be implementing longer and more complex formulas, using hidden questions and values, and calculations referring to multiple answers that would otherwise have to be done manually.
- Four bananas means that you’re pushing the limits of what Survey123 is capable of right now. You’re implementing complex surveys, studying what the XLSForm standard is capable of, and speculating about features that Survey123 doesn’t yet support
Right now you can see the banana rating in the Samples that are available in Survey123 Connect.
New blogs will also use the banana rating to help convey the difficulty, complexity and time to digest for the content.