Note: This is still a very early-stage project and not quite production ready, though we’re happy if you’d like to try it out and give us feedback!

This project brings together three open source technologies (Quarto, shiny, and supabase) to create dynamic, markdown-based surveys. Here’s the basic concept:

1. Design your survey as a Quarto shiny document using markdown and R code.
2. Render your doc into a shiny app that can be hosted online and sent to respondents.
3. Store your survey responses in a supabase database.

The {surveydown} R package works in tandem with our surveydown Quarto extension to make everything work. After installing the package, we recommend working from one of our template example surveys to design your own.

See the documentation page to get started making your own surveydown survey!

surveydown was created as a markdown-based alternative to platforms like Google Forms, Qualtrics, Survey Monkey, etc. Unlike every other platform, it allows the user to define their entire survey content using markdown and R code, making the survey itself fully reproducible and easy to share and collaborate with others. The resulting shiny app for each survey can be hosted on a number of platforms, like shinyapps.io or huggingface, and the survey data collected is owned by the survey designer in their supabase account. Best of all, everything is open source and free :)

If you’re curious where this whole idea came from, check out this blog post, which outlines more on the general idea and the motivation for it. The post is now outdated in terms of the overall design, but it provides something of an origin story and some of the motivation for developing this project.

This is a running list of things we’re working on adding to the project:

• show_if (conditionally display question)
• skip_if (conditionally skip to page)
• Set defaults for questions to not have any choices selected on launch.
• Ability to embed markdown inside choice options (like mc buttons in formr)
• Option for preview = TRUE (database is ignored)
• Export timestamps on each page in the data
• Export timestamps on each question interaction (since this will increase the data size considerably, maybe add this as question_times = FALSE argument)
• Option to start at a designated page, e.g. start_page = 'page_name'
• A show_all = TRUE argument to show all the pages and hidden questions when launched (e.g. to be able to print out the entire survey text). Could also be called print_mode = TRUE.
• Set up SCSS to be compatible with Quarto-supported bootstrap themes
• Add an optional progress bar
• Include input checks for skip_if and show_if (question_id exists, and data frame names are correct)
• Required questions (required = TRUE): post a popup if a question is required before allowing next button. Default should be required = FALSE.
• Form validation: Make sure the user inputs the correct type depending on the question type. (see https://shiny.posit.co/r/reference/shiny/0.14/validate.html)
• Admin page w/password to preview / download data (see https://github.com/daattali/shinyforms)
• User tracking via url parameters: https://shinysurveys.jdtrat.com/articles/surveying-shinysurveys.html#user-tracking
• Deal with cookies so users who close the browser can start back where they left off.
• Add a sd_get_data() function so the survey designer can obtain the current survey results from inside the app: https://shinysurveys.jdtrat.com/articles/get-survey-data.html
• Question types:
  • Multiple choice (single choice)
  • Multiple choice (multiple choices)
  • Select
  • Text
  • Numeric
  • Multiple choice (button…like formr mc_button)
  • Text area
  • Date
  • Matrix
  • Slider

Resources / examples:

• shinysurveys
• shinyforms
• Example of adding JS modules to shiny app (pop up message) - could be useful for adding any number of JS-based features, like pop ups for required questions, JS-based progress bar, etc.

Vignettes for each of the following:

• Quick overview / basic usage
• List of question types and examples
• Question formatting options
• Flow control (conditional skipping and conditional display)
• Setting up the database with supabase

If you use this package for in a publication, please cite it! You can get the citation by typing citation("surveydown") into R:

citation("surveydown")