Designing 600+ survey forms: lessons in offline-first data

Field data collection breaks in ways an office never sees: no signal, low-end devices, and enumerators who need the form to just work. Offline-first isn't a feature here — it's the whole job.

Validate early, sync late

Constraints and skip logic catch bad data at entry, on-device. Everything queues locally and syncs opportunistically, so a dropped connection never means a lost interview.