Ona Beta: New Features Roundup

Ona Staff
June 19, 2015

On our quest to allow anyone to collect, understand, and use data for humanitarian purposes, we’ve been introducing new features on Ona Beta for months. We’ve rebuilt the service from the ground up with new code and a new look, added features for collaboration and improved data management, and built a support team to help our users when they run into problems. Here’s a summary of what’s new in Ona Beta.

Projects

Many users reported trouble organizing their forms. Often, multiple form versions or different forms for project phases were hard to find in a single list. With Projects, forms get grouped into project folders, which also makes it easy to share a set of forms (more on sharing next). Explore an example project.

##Improved sharing

With the latest sharing update, several people can work on the same projects — without sharing user logins and passwords — and be given specific access to projects. The share settings occur at the project level, which means that if you have access to a project, you have access to its forms.

Organizations

Along with improved sharing, Organizations are meant to make it easier to securely manage data when projects are done by a group of people working on multiple projects. Organization projects are automatically shared with all members of an organization. Members of the organization can either be data spectators or be involved in creating and managing projects. Explore an example organization.

Tabbed data visualization

Data visualization in Ona Beta has been updated to easily switch between map, table, and summary chart views. Single submissions are also persistent through the tabs to make navigating easier. Explore tabbed data visualization.

More view-by options on maps

On the map, we added view-by support for multi-select and integers. Multi-select field submissions (or as I call them, “the checkbox questions”) are highlighted if a selected answer is chosen, i.e. answer 1 or answer 2.

Integer answers are grouped into number rangers, which can be viewed and filtered on the map.

New user interface

And to manage the above and be prepared for future features, we’ve updated our overall interface to be cleaner and more flexible.

Try it out!

All of these features are viewable on Ona Beta except for Organizations. If you want to try Organizations, email us and we’ll get you setup. To try Ona Beta, use your existing Ona account to login to beta.ona.io using the same credentials. All of your existing forms will be collected in a single Project called “your username’s Project”. Caution: all data in beta is live and changes are saved. You can return to using www.ona.io at any time — the data is the same for both sites. Please send feedback to beta@ona.io.