Vivek Bhaskaran « QuestionPro Blog

The Bias and Art of Soliciting feedback – Why Survey Design is important.

October 2, 2009 · Leave a Comment

I’ve always been a big fan of the TED Talks. TED (Technology Entertainment and Design) is a invite only conference that is held in the Bay Area every year. The attendees are some of the smartest minds in the world and they present. This particular video caught my attention – He talks about how humans make decisions – “Default behavior” etc.

If you are into any sort of data-collection human subject (soliciting feedback) research – I strongly encourage you to watch this embeded video (link to the video below just in case the video does not show up)

http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_ariely_asks_are_we_in_control_of_our_own_decisions.html

Categories: Uncategorized

WA State Tax Comes to QuestionPro

August 12, 2009 · Leave a Comment

Nothing is certain – But death and taxes – well at least for WA State residents. WA state just passed into law an “Digital Goods” tax. This tax applies to all “Subscription” and “online” services (premium) – In our case – this _does_ apply to us.

Good News:
We are only supposed to collect taxes for WA state residents! So if you are not in WA state, you can use QP tax free!

Bad News:
If you _are_ a WA state resident (if your Credit Card has a WA state code billing address) we will be charging you a 9.5% tax on all purchases. We are currently in the process of updating our billing system to reflect this.

FAQ:

Q: I am not in the United States – am I affected?
A: No.

Q: My company is physically located outside WA state, but my credit card billing has WA state in it? Am I affected?
A: Yes. If your credit card billing address is in WA state, we are required to collect 9.5% digital goods sales tax.

Q: When will this go into affect?
A: Over the next month, we will be updating our billing system. You should see a line item in your invoice for the 9.5% Digital Goods Tax

Q: Any way I can avoid paying this tax?
A: No. We are required by law to collect this and cannot make any exceptions.

Categories: Uncategorized

QuestionPro University Partnership – Free Access to Students and Faculty

July 31, 2009 · 2 Comments

Over the years, we’ve offered QuestionPro free for Non-Profits and Students (on an individual basis) – Over next few months, we are planning on phasing out the Individual Student License and focus our efforts on the University Partnership.

The University Partnership License is an easy model for both universities and us to engage students and faculty members to collect data and analyze them. With the current belt-tightening and reduced budgets universities can offer their students access to QuestionPro across the board free of charge.

What is the catch?
Nothing is really free – correct – yes. We actually gain two important aspects:

a) Visibility – Students using QP usually after graduation come back to use us in a commercial setting. B-School students often take up jobs as Product Managers or decision makers that need data – Surveys are obviously an easy model to collect data.

b) Cutting Edge Enhancements – We are obviously big believers in “keeping ahead of the curve” and a lot of our enhancements that we’ve done are a direct response to users asking for them. Typically students and faculty members are more inclined to try out new models and ideas for data-collection than commercial counterparts. This allows QuestionPro to be in tune with trying new ideas.

Unique Challenges in the Academic Environment
One of the single biggest challenges doing a human-subject study is IRB Approval. If you’re a student or a faculty member – you know the process and the challenge. We have designed a few specific ideas that help you with the IRB Approval process:

a) Having an INTRO QuestionType with an “I Agree” Checkbox – This is almost a requirement by most IRB’s of Universities that human subjects explicitly agree to the survey process.

b) Standard agreements with some universities for IRB and Data-Collection Standards.

c) Details on Privacy and Compliance – than can be submitted to the IRB’s as part of the approval process.

http://www.questionpro.com/compliance/

What participants have said

“QuestionPro survey builder is much
easier than other products I have tried, and the level of support was
quite impressive. From creating the survey to analyzing the data, QuestionPro made the process simple yet professional.”

Bret Roark

Director of Assessment

Oklahoma Baptist University

Getting On-Board with the University Partnership
We’ve also streamlined the on-boarding of the partnership. If you are the dean or a faculty member (or if you are a student – please ask your faculty member) please see:

http://www.questionpro.com/corporate-sponsorship/

All the details are there. You can apply for it online and we’ve also a dedicated Point of Contact for all University Partnership Requests – You can email Naeem Shaik – naeem.s [at] surveyanalytics [dot] com – he can guide you through the process and answer any questions.

Additional References:

University Partnership Details
http://questionpro.com/corporate-sponsorship
FAQ on University Sponsorship
http://questionpro.com/help/211.html
Partnership Inquiries:
naeems [at] surveyanalytics [dot] com

Categories: Newsletter · QuestionPro

Power Outage – Recap #fisherplazafire

July 6, 2009 · Leave a Comment

As many of you are aware we had a day long outage on Friday. I wanted to give everyone a sense of what happened, what we are doing etc.

On Friday (July 3rd) – there was a fire in Fisher Plaza. Fisher Plaza is a “Communication Hub” in the NorthWest – its host to a bunch of datacenters as well as TV and Radio Stations. The fire caused the automatic sprinker system to kick in and essentially shut down power to one of the buildings.

3:00 AM
We learned about this around 3AM Friday morning. All QuestionPro technical staff were online assessing the situation by about 5AM. Since this was a system wide outage (as opposed to a group of servers failing) – we simply had to asses the situation as it developed.

6:00 AM
We get preliminary indication that the root cause of the power failure is the fire and that no-one is allowed to enter/leave the building till Seattle Fire Department does a sweep. At this point we are all online, waiting for Seattle Fire to clear and give the thumbs up. We redirected traffic to QuestionPro.com to a temporary set of servers with a downtime notice. We asked users to check out our twitter feed for updates as well as our status page (status.surveyanalytics.com)

9:00AM
We get indication that Fisher Electrical contractor is trying to get power back online – drying out the equipment to make sure its safe to operate. We start putting updates on the QuestionPro and IdeaScale twiiter accounts (twitter.com/questionpro and twitter.com/ideascale) – both QP and IS are hosted in the same set of cabinets. The entire building is out of power and its a challenge even to get in and out of the building (no elevators, electronic key cards don’t work etc.)

We also make the determination that we should wait till about 5PM to see of the power comes back online before moving all the data to another data-center. We also have space in a backup data-center.

12:00PM
Fisher and Internap communicate that they are bringing in mobile generators in Flat Bed Trucks – the plan is to get the Generators fired up and bypass the electrical room altogether (where the water damage was)

5:00PM
Engineers are still working on bypassing the electrical room. We decide to wait for a couple of more hours. There are a lot of other issues with moving all the data into the backup data-center – re-configuring the systems would take us a longer time and we run the risk of not having enough servers to handle to load. Our backup systems are meant to store backups (not run the entire load and applications.)

10:00PM
Power is restored to HVAC (heating and cooling) equipment. Power is then slowly turned on to all the customer (our) equipment.

3:00AM
Power comes back online – Our servers start humming – All QuestionPro technical staff is online by 5AM – We start working on making sure all services come back online properly. – By about 6:45AM we are all back to normal.

Twitter – Works like a charm:
We tried to keep everyone abreast of issues as they developed on twitter. We were issuing updates and following updates using the following hashtags – #fisherfire and #fisherplazafire. If anyone every doubted the uselfullness of Twitter in an emergency – this has proven (to me at least) first hand that Twitter indeed is amazingly useful to communicate in the face of an emergency.

Through twitter we found out that we were not the only ones affected by this fire – Some of the other sites that went offline are:

authorize.net
bing.com/travel (farecast)
bigfishgames
Bartell Drugs
allrecepies.com

Needless to say, this is pretty big disruption of our services. Both Fisher Plaza and Internap have promised us that they’ll come up with a detailed explanation of the issues and steps to prevent such outages in the future. Meanwhile this also exposed a couple of vulenerabilities on our own preparedness. In the spirit of openness I’ll talk about them – and not only will we talk about it, we’ll also do something about it – and keep you posted on progress.

We will be posting a series of blog posts with the hashtag #fisherplazfire to communicate effectively the steps we are taking to make sure this kind of a distuption does not happen in the future. Like with any system, we cannot make things 100% – but we sure as hell can try.

Short Term Issues:

Communication:
One of the shortcomings we noticed was that our Blog (which is our primary medium of communication) was also hosted within our data-center. This has to change — we;ll be moving our blog (blog.questionpro.com) to a hosted WordPress – Rob Hoehn is in charge of that and will oversee that. We’ll also take this opportunity to segment our blogging – we’ll setup three separate blogs (one for QuestionPro, IdeaScale and MicroPoll.)

Automated Phone Message:
We should be able to deliver the same information (like twitter updates) when people call up. We use Angel.com for our hosted PBX system – We’ll setup the system so we can give out updates when users call in in times of emergencies like this.

Pre-Planned Error Page:
We should have a system in place to switch our systems to an error page (when all hell has broken loose) – we had to scramble at the last minute to setup a separate system (in our backup data-center) to host the error page itself.

Long Term Issues:

Real-Time Data-Center Redundancy:
We have full redundancy _within_ the data-center. So if any one of our servers dies (hard drive failure, etc.) – other servers pick up the slack automatically. If one of our database-servers crash, we have replicated servers that will come online automatically within seconds. However, if the entire data-center goes offline, our current plan does not have a solution to move to another data-center within minutes. We have full copies of the data stored offsite – but that is only the data.

What we need to get to, is to _operate_ out of a different data-center in case of a massive emergency like this. This will undoubtedly will double our operating expenses, but given then business we are in, we simply need to do this. Over the next three months, we’ll be figuring out a solution so that we can sustain turning off power to our primary data-center and things move to our backup data-center.

Finally, I want to acknowledge the patience some of you have shown and understanding many of our customers have shown in the face of this emergency. As the CEO and an Owner of this business I do not take this lightly.

If there is something I can do for you, please feel free to ping me directly – vivek[dot]bhaskaran[at]surveyanalytics[dot]com

Categories: Uncategorized

Google is no longer the undusputed king – Twitter Search Rules.

June 18, 2009 · Leave a Comment

I started using google back in 1997 – when I was a student at BYU – We were trying to solve a programming assignment and one of my buddies told me about this cool search engine called Google – better than HotBot, Lycos or even Yahoo. We searched on Google – found the answer to our question on the first page – since been addicted to Google.

Yes – there is Bing – but seriously – as they say in the MS campus – the only people who use MSN/Live Search are the people who have not figured out how to change the default Home page on IE.

Today – however Google failed me – I use adium (IM Client) to connect to all the messaging networks (Adium connects to Yahoo, MSN Messenger, Facebook etc.) – For the last two or three days Adium has not been able to connect to the Yahoo servers. At first obviously I thought this was some issue with my network. I wanted to see if others are experiencing this same issue and what the solution could be:

As with everthing, I googled it – Could not find anything interesting! There were a couple of results, but they were referencing blogs/content created months ago!

Screenshot:

I then searched for the same search terms on Twitter:

I downloaded the nightly build of Adium – and bliss….

Categories: Best Practice · Feature Enhancements

Progressive Filtering and Graduating Innovation

March 3, 2009 · Leave a Comment

This week I wanted to share some common insights we’ve acquired as we have more and more companies use tools like IdeaScale to crowdsource innovation. We’ll focus on the administrative aspect of bubbling ideas to the top and then going through a secondary layer of filtering and re-prioritization of ideas.

The Challenge:
Customers have a lot of ideas on what you should and should not do. Most companies have finite resources and typically a strategy direction. Many times they will not align – Where your customers want you to go and where you can go might be off. Crowdsourcing tools like IdeaScale allow you to capture this differential but the larger issue then becomes — how do you prevent distortion in your strategy if you keep chasing the tactical benefits of what users want today? Typically in these solutions, the “Voice of Customer” is represented, but what about the “Voice of the Company/Employees?”

The (Proposed) Solution:
As with most things we do here, we like to keep things simple. We’ve batted around many ideas and thoughts about how to refocus and re-filter ideas coming from customers so that they are aligned with the direction of the company. They include ideas like giving the moderator/employees more “weight” to allowing moderators/employees to veto ideas etc. Most of these solutions increase a level of complexity that almost makes the solution useless.
The solution we’ve been proposing to our clients now is what we are calling the “Graduate Idea” functionality.
Idea Graduation allows admins to move ideas, or rather graduate ideas from one site to the other. Typically, the graduating (target) ideascale site is an internal (employee, review group, strategy group) only system. This filtered idea portal can be defined as ideas that have passed the sniff test manually. At this point, we think it’s smart to keep this manual – by the reviewer/moderator to take a look at the top rated ideas and graduate them to an internal system for further discussion.

Internally, Customer Support Reps, Sales Agents, Decision Makers, can engage in a productive and open discussion – they do not need to be concerned that the comments and thoughts will be out the in the open – this graduated portal typically will be an invite-only internal site that external customers will not have access to. We’ve had a lot of success with having a few “high profile” or “power users” be a part of the secondary review/filter site. This way, internal team members can communicate effectively with the influencers.
Internal team members can be automatically notified when new ideas are graduated into the site. They can then come and vote/comment on them and also review existing comments that others have put. In theory, you could have multiple layers here if you really wanted to get uber-bureaucratic and have infinite layers of filtering!

Where we are headed:
As we rolled out the Idea Graduation model, we received some great feedback about a few enhancements to the process that we can make – I’ll share that here and definitely open to more suggestions on how this can be improved without complicating the process too much:

Automatic Graduation when an Idea reaches “X” Votes

There are some outstanding issues here – Since this is automated it might actually be counterproductive. The internal idea portal by definition is a “vetted” and human endorsed idea portal.

Once ideas are graduated by this model, they are no longer available in the external site for people to comment on. In some cases there might be an active comment discussion thread going on – and this would stifle the brainstorming activity.
Graduating Ideas to multiple internal sites. In some cases, depending upon the volume and size of the business, it actually may make sense to create multiple internal sites demarcated along product lines or some other categorization model. In such cases, the Idea Graduation process needs to be able to account for this kind of a setup.

A couple of other minor enhancements also came up that we would be addressing very soon:

Ability to mark the Source Idea as “Under Review” instead of “Closed” when graduating an idea.
Ability to manually set the status of the new Idea as well as choose the category it goes under.
Ability to manually notify and invite internal team members specifically to comment and brainstorm on an idea while graduating it. This is helpful if you need a domain expert internally to comment on the idea to give his opinion.

As we develop and refine the Idea Graduation process we, as usual, welcome your input. If you have other use-cases and ideas on how to manage this process please feel free to post it on our IdeaScale portal -

http://ideas.ideascale.com (Under the IdeaScale category.)

Categories: Best Practice