Chapter 12: Workshop Synthesis: Designing New Survey Interfaces

Transportation survey methodologists are increasingly turning to information technologies and geomatics to enhance data quality, to decrease respondent burden, to lower costs and, eventually, to design continuous self-administered surveys that are predominantly passive. There are still considerable challenges to understanding the usability and relevance of these survey interfaces to gather complex spatial-temporal data on daily travels. Good designs depend on a strong understanding of web technologies and an excellent sense of graphic design, layout and style to build high performance front-end user interface components that engage the users. The very growth in computing power and design options for the latest systems also means that there are more opportunities to get it wrong. The goal is to design systems that do not comprise an effectively integrated information system that works well as a whole. Much can be learned from models of recent integrated survey systems and the challenges and solutions that were a part of their development.