Overview

surveydown is a flexible, open-source platform for making surveys with , Quarto, Shiny, and Supabase. The accompanying package is still in development, but you can already use it to create surveys!

The basic concept is this:

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.

We recommend reading the Getting Started page to get a sense of how to use surveydown. The rest of the documentation covers more details on how to use surveydown.

Editing a surveydown survey

Editing a surveydown survey feels like editing a Quarto document. As a result, we recommend working with an IDE to edit your surveys as they offer a better experience. RStudio is great, and we also like VS Code and Positron.

Once you have a survey ready to edit in your favorite IDE, you can render it locally to see how it will look as you change features. For example, the gif below shows what it looks like to make a question required. This gives you an idea for what the development process is like. And because surveydown leverages Shiny and Quarto, you can add all sorts of custom features and styles to your survey!

Background & Motivation

Most survey platforms (e.g., Google forms, Qualtrics, etc.) use drag-and-drop interfaces to design surveys, making version control and collaboration with others difficult. They’re also not reproducible (others cannot easily reproduce a survey made on these platforms), and many require a paid subscription or license to use.

As an open-source, markdown-based platform, surveydown was designed to address these problems. In surveydown, all survey content is created with plain text (markdown and R code) in a single .qmd file that renders into a Shiny app. This makes your survey easy to reproduce, share, and version control with common tools like Git. The survey data collected is also owned by the survey designer in a 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 The post is now outdated in terms of the overall package design, but it provides something of an origin story and some of the motivation for developing this project.

Authors

The surveydown project is led by professor John Paul Helveston at George Washington University. The development team consists of the following members:

John Paul Helveston, Ph.D.

John Paul Helveston is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Engineering Management and Systems Engineering at George Washington University. Professor Helveston is the core designer and developer, and maintainer of both the surveydown project and this documentation website.

Pingfan Hu

Pingfan Hu is a Ph.D. student in Systems Engineering at George Washington University, supervised by professor Helveston. Pingfan is mainly responsible for UI design, user interactions, and website maintenance.

Bogdan Bunea

Bogdan Bunea is an undergraduate student majoring in Systems Engineering and minoring in Computer Science at George Washington University. Bogdan is mainly responsible for database connection and data management.