Data apps
App appearance
Everything here lives in App settings → Design → Appearance. Colours, fonts and corner radius are the Palette section below it, and the two are deliberately independent: an app can be recoloured without being rearranged.
How steps are shown
The one setting that changes how the app is used rather than how it looks.
| Option | What a respondent sees |
|---|---|
| Stacked page | Every step on one long page, filled top to bottom. The default, and the right choice for a short programme. |
| One step at a time | A page per step, with a progress bar, numbered chips and Back / Next. Submit appears only on the last step. |
Paging suits a long programme, where a single page of every question at once is discouraging to open. It changes nothing about how the report is filed: answers are still staged as you go and everything is still submitted together at the end.
Moving between steps never loses anything — you can jump forward and back freely using the chips, including to a step you have not reached yet, and answers stay exactly as typed.
Page width
How much of a large screen the app fills. Every option is an upper bound, so a phone renders the same however you set it.
| Width | Best for |
|---|---|
| Narrow | A short, reading-length form. The measure a single form uses. |
| Medium | A general-purpose middle ground. |
| Wide | The default. Several steps, or repeatable entries. |
| Full width | Dense data entry — many short fields, or a wide matrix. |
Header
| Style | What it is |
|---|---|
| Plain card | Title, description and period on a card. The default. |
| Colour wash | Your brand colour as a band behind the title. Needs no image. |
| Cover image | A full-bleed image with the title over it. |
| Slim bar | A single line and a rule under it, for dense internal tools. |
Step headings
- Underlined heading — a title with a rule beneath it. The default.
- Numbered timeline — numbered discs joined by a connecting line, so the order of the steps is visible at a glance.
- Collapsible — each step folds away once finished. Useful when a step holds many repeated entries.
- Plain heading — the title alone, for the least chrome.
A collapsed step reopens automatically if submission finds a problem inside it, so nothing can hide an error.
Spacing and background
Spacing — compact, comfortable or spacious — sets the page padding, the gaps between steps and the padding inside cards. It does not change the spacing between individual fields, which is fixed so that a form looks the same inside an app as it does on its own link. Compact is tighter, not smaller.
Background adds dots, a grid, a colour mesh or a single accent bar across the top of the page. All are drawn from your own palette, so they cost no image and cannot clash with your colours.
Layout and field widths
Design → Layoutdecides how the fields inside each step are arranged. This is the setting that governs whether a question's half or full width is honoured.
| Option | Effect on every step |
|---|---|
| Stacked | One field per row, whatever the form was built as. |
| Two column | Narrow fields pair up, whatever the form was built as. |
| Follow each form | Each step uses the layout its form was designed with, so per-question widths apply. |
Choose Follow each form when
- Your forms were designed individually, with deliberate field widths.
- One step is a dense grid of codes and another is mostly long answers.
- You are using one step at a time, where each step is its own page anyway.
Impose one layout when
- The steps should feel like one continuous document.
- The forms were never given widths, so there is nothing to inherit.
- A column count changing between steps would look like a fault.
Conversational forms are always shown stacked inside an app. An app already paces the respondent with its own steps, and one question at a time inside a paged step would be a wizard within a wizard.