Best Practice: Intake form for system outage report | XM Community
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Hi community!



I am designing an intake form in Qualtrics that will eventually be used to report and pair with other data. I am still trying to wrap my head around the best way to collect some of the data so that it is formatted in a way that I can easily use while also being a user-friendly form. I am curious if anyone has done anything similar and would love to see the approach taken (.qsf gladly accepted!).



One of the big challenges I am having is that system outage in hours may not be consistent (i.e. could be constant _n_ hours or could be intermittent outages over _n_ hours) and could span multiple days.



If I simply had inputs for Date of outage and Hours outage occurred then I couldn't show when an outage occurs over multiple days as I (I think). For example, if an outage happens for 55 hours over 3 days, then a simple bar chart would make it look like 1 day (the first day) had 55 hours of outage, which is impossible. _Maybe a math operations could solve this?_



Anyway, just curious what others have done with similar challenges.
I haven't done this specifically but I think if I were in your shoes, I'd have two embedded data fields: one with the number and one with the unit. Then I'd use branching logic and math operations to distinguish whether the unit should be hours or days and to convert the number based off of that.
I've thought of that, but I would still have an issue of associating all the hours/days to a single date.
Hmm...can you do start date of the outage and then use the <number> <hours/days> thing associated with that? That would tell you (implicitly) the end date too.
Right, but I can only graph a single date, not a date range (I believe).
Oh wait...I just understood what you were saying. You were talking about representing it graphically.



I think in that case, what I would try to do is to plot the dates on one axis and then a number of dates on the other axis, using a bar graph. So you could see when it started and how long it lasted in days. Alternatively, you could use a calendar visualization.



Are you trying to show this in CX Dashboards or another tool like Tableau/Domo/Power BI?

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