If you can envision it, you can build it. How’s that for an experience?

September 1, 2023

Chris Harlow

ArcGIS Experience Builder is here and it’s making a bold claim: “If you can envision it, you can build it.”

A GIS is highly configurable and accessible. We can capture assets in the field and instantly see them on our computers in the office. We can monitor the status of our assets, plan for upgrades or repairs, and even help shape the future.

ArcGIS Experience Builder extends this high configurability of GIS to the web by allowing you—even if you have little to no experience using code—to develop apps and other experiences that people can interact with. Using these experiences, your audiences will be able to understand, participate and ultimately experience the power of GIS.

Great, but what does ArcGIS Experience Builder actually look like in practice?

I’ve gathered three recent examples to help you better understand how ArcGIS Experience Builder is helping users layer their datasets interactively in a no-code environment. It’s helping users track emergent situations in real time, visualize their organizations’ assets for upper management and add deeper context to their spatial analyses—and more.

A screenshot of the snow clearing app with blue, green and pink traces on a map. A pop-up window allows a user to select if the activity is street clearing, de-icing or snow pickup.

The City of Kamloops used ArcGIS Experience Builder’s no-code capabilities to develop a number of apps to support their operations, including this Street Snow Clearing app. The Snow Clearing app allows operators to update where de-icing solution has been used, where snow has been picked up and trucked away, and which transit stops have been cleared. Integration with ArcGIS Dashboards then allows supervisors to monitor overall status.

A screenshot of the Air Quality Aware App taken on August 29, 2023. Users can zoom in and out to interact with the points for various Canadian cities and get real-time reports on Environment Canada’s Air Quality Health Index.

The Air Quality Aware App, developed by Esri Canada’s Public Health team, uses ArcGIS Experience Builder to help users interact with up-to-date data about air quality across Canada. It shows active wildfire perimeters and allows users to assess health risk due to air quality in the locations that matter most to them.

A screenshot of an ArcGIS Experience Builder app that examines urban heat in its relationship to social determinants of health in Montréal. The city surface, projected in three dimensions, is covered in pink bars of varying heights that show the variation in temperature by location.

In this ArcGIS Experience Builder app, which concerns urban heat in Montréal and its relationship to social determinants of health, data can be viewed in 2D or projected in 3D, as the user has done here. The app also incorporates different types of tabs: scrollable webpage-like info pages add context to the mapped data, and dashboard-style pages with graphs provide additional analysis of the available data.

A few ArcGIS Experience Builder resources to get you started

Curious about ArcGIS Experience Builder? There are plenty of free resources available to get you started.

Video: Learn the building blocks of ArcGIS Experience Builder
Success Story: Volunteer-based GIS organization creates apps for disaster response
Documentation: What Is ArcGIS Experience Builder?
Explore more apps built with ArcGIS Experience Builder: Gallery

Craving an in-depth guided tour of ArcGIS Experience Builder instead, with the benefit of an instructor who can answer your questions directly? My upcoming instructor-led course, Building Web Apps with ArcGIS Experience Builder, gives you sixteen hours of instruction to help you build exactly what you’re envisioning.

Want to stay informed about all the latest training opportunities at Esri Canada? Visit Esri Canada’s Communication Preference Centre and select the “Training” checkbox to get a monthly roundup straight to your inbox.