![]() For some apps, this meant building a data collection survey to measure my own coffee intake-and the quality of it for others, it meant building a door-to-door sales tracking app, or at least my take on one. Where there were tutorials or sample data, I followed along or explored them. I signed up for whatever trial account was available and tried to use it in the way the app encouraged me. Since data collection is such a broad problem to solve-and the apps that tackle it do so in similarly broad ways-there wasn't really a universal testing protocol for these apps. in Business and Management, so I'm familiar with many of the problems surrounding collecting and collating good data. In addition to my decade of experience as a tech writer and app reviewer, I also have a BSc. Not only are all these tools nice to use, but they also allow you to make data collection tools that are nice to use. It's infuriating having to battle against badly designed, horrendously laid out, and just awful user interfaces. Almost all of us have used tools that feel like they were designed by a committee that had just watched a short YouTube video on the problem they had to solve. The better your data collection app integrates with the rest of the software you use, the easier it is for you to understand what's happening on the ground. Gathering data is all well and good, but you also need to be able to do something with it. ![]() Integration with third-party apps, APIs, and other external tools. Where two apps offered similar feature sets, we favored the ones with the lowest-or at least easiest to understand-pricing. Some of these apps can get expensive quickly, especially for large teams. For each app, we needed some special reason that it was worth including. Some apps handle location data really well, whereas others have incredibly intuitive form builders. Here's what we were looking for when testing these apps for data collection:Ī unique or standout feature that the app did better than its competitors. These are all a given, and to be honest, even the worst tools we tested mostly met these criteria-they were just more awkward and otherwise unpleasant to use. What separates a great data collection tool from the merely adequate, then, are all the extras. They have to work offline, so you aren't worried about a cellular or Wi-Fi connection in remote locations.Īnd they need to make it so you can use the data and see what's happening. They need to make it easy for your staff or research team to accurately track the information they need. For more details on our process, read the full rundown of how we select apps to feature on the Zapier blog.įield data collection tools have to do a few things: We're never paid for placement in our articles from any app or for links to any site-we value the trust readers put in us to offer authentic evaluations of the categories and apps we review. We spend dozens of hours researching and testing apps, using each app as it's intended to be used and evaluating it against the criteria we set for the category. All of our best apps roundups are written by humans who've spent much of their careers using, testing, and writing about software.
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