The QuestionPro Blog

Wanted to share a few updates regarding IdeaScale with everyone.



Tagging Upgrade:

We've revamped how we do tags. Tags now display the total number of times users have used a tag, as well as the ability to click on a tag and search all entries related to that tag.



Pending Items:

• Tag Cloud (or something that displays the leaderboard of tags)
• Integrating tags with search
  

A small community here in Seattle of tech geeks are working hard to plan their upcoming conference. They are called the "Six Hour Startup" -- the basic premise is - they want to create a startup -- you guessed it -- IN SIX HOURS.

The Six Hour Startup (or SHS) is a tight knit groups of technology geeks, design dudes, marketing folks that get together once a month (on a Saturday) and launch a new startup!

They are currently trying out IdeaScale -- Check out some ideas that people have proposed:

• http://sixhourstartup.ideascale.com

• http://www.ideascale.com

One of the hardest things about having a loyal customer/fan base using your software, is that it can be a bit bumpy trying to make UI enhancements. On one end, you want to address concerns that a new user might have when first introduced to the system (aka, "non-intuitive UI"). However, one will soon find that balancing the former without upsetting your current user base can leave the road to innovation and change quite bumpy.

That being said we bring you the new and improved, AJAX powered, question wizard! Now you can add questions faster than a speeding bullet, tweak questions in a flash, even reference recently used scales like butter! We are very excited to offer a much faster and more intuitive way to churn out surveys and drive results.

As I mentioned, the road can get bumpy. Its a little nerve racking when you click on "Add Question" and a flashy AJAX window pops up instead of the old clunky wizard. Never fear, our rock-star support team is here! They've been busy soothing our customers nerves, pointing the veteran survey builder to the proper screen to create an extraction question, tweak a validation, or add a scale to a question.

We hope you enjoy the new question wizard - we continue to work hard to make survey building as easy as possible.

Sometimes we get so wrapped up in fairly high-level enhancements, we overlook some fairly obvious ones. The other day I needed to delete a lot of questions (about 30) in a survey and it occurred to us that a simple multiple select option in the survey outline would be easier! In a few days, check out your survey outline to try it out.

This is a fairly common use case that we get requests for: the need to update your email list without losing sent history, custom variables, etc. Well we listened, and implemented a simple sync tool for email lists (will be available in a few days).

Now when you upload a CSV file into an existing list (using the Data Sync tool) two things will happen:

1) If the email address is new, a new entry is appended to the list.
2) If an email address already exists, all the custom variables will be updated with the entry.

The TSA is getting a lot of press these days for doing something very simple: they are blogging about their security practices. People can read about why certain procedures are implemented, and can comment back with additional questions/concerns.

Blogging isn't rocket science, and it isn't anything new. However, more and more organizations are realizing that blogging is the next step in the evolution of customer feedback. To that end, we are always looking for new ideas to innovate.

Surveys, in their current form, produce structured quantitative data. We have many customers, however, come to us looking for ways to collect qualitative feedback. The problem of course, comes down to sifting through all those open ended text questions for meaningful data.

Our latest incarnation, IdeaScale, attempts to marry quantitative and qualitative data together in a very innovative way. Through the use of Digg-style forums, anyone can post a comment/idea, and visitors vote the idea up or down. In addition (and this is my favorite), you can easily configure the tool so that visitors cannot submit a comment until they rate a predefined number of ideas. This is really handy for large organization as it provides a way to harness the wisdom of the crowd to communicate the most important information.

Ask your sales representative about IdeaScale to see if this tool would be the right fit for you.

Many a times a customer would have a long survey and would want to display only one question per page. Obviously possible, but you would need to place a page break after every question which is time consuming. So we thought of a solution and came up with the Interactive Display Mode. Now instead of adding page breaks to your survey all you need to do is go to Edit Survey >> Randomization Options >> Interactive Display Mode and select the one question/page option.

After that we had one more barrier: if we have respondents select one question per page and the survey is lengthy we would have frustrated respondents as they will have to keep selecting the answer option and clicking on continue. At this point we enhanced the one question/page so that as soon as the respondent would select the answer option the survey will auto submit and move forward.

QuestionPro is working on many more Interactive Display modes and as soon as we go live with anything new we will keep every one posted.

Cheers

Aditya

We had many customers using the Combined Reports tool for combing Results for Multiple Multi Lingual Surveys and their main concern was "how to save these Combined Reports?" as earlier the system would only show a Real Time Summary of the consolidated data which could not be saved .

QuestionPro has now Enhanced the Combined Reports tool. Now As soon as you Run a Combined Report for multiple surveys an Excel Report is generated with the consolidated Data.

This Enhancement has satisfied all our customers using the Combined report tool.

At QuestionPro we keep enhancing all our tools based on our customer's requirements so if you are using any QuestionPro tool and you feel that an enhancement might make the tool even better please feel free to let us know.

Thank you and Have a Nice Day !

We are launching a new series of blog entries for best practice solutions for common problems. These are a little more in-depth than the standard knowledge base/help that QuestionPro has.

Here is the first one:

Survey On Multiple Websites : Issues, Analysis and Implementation

Problem Statement:

I have multiple websites and I would like to conduct a survey (popup, link) on all those sites. I want to however be able to analyze the data on a per-website basis -- So I can view the stats for a particular site, as well as view the aggregate data across all the sites. What is the best way I can achieve this? The survey itself (structure, questions) is exactly the same.

Solution Overview:
The key here is that the survey structure is the same. If you have the exact same survey structure for the survey, you can use Custom Variables in the URL to identify which link users are clicking on and tag the data as it is collected with the custom variables.

Implementation Details:

Use the "Custom Variable" option within QuestionPro. With QuestionPro
every survey has a unique URL. Its something like: (xxx is the unique
identifier for your survey)

http://www.questionpro.com/akira/TakeSurvey?id=xxx

Now, you can also add custom parameters to the URL that also get
captured when someone takes the survey by clicking on the link. For
example:

http://www.questionpro.com/akira/TakeSurvey?id=xxx&custom1=flowers.com

http://www.questionpro.com/akira/TakeSurvey?id=xxx&custom1=roses.com

Now both the links lead to the same survey (identified by xxx), but in one case, the
value "flowers.com" and the other case "roses.com" will be captured
along with the data.

The good news is that QuestionPro provides for easy segmentation
based on Custom Variables.

Simply go to the "Grouping/Segmentation"
section and create data sets for the segment you want to analyze. Use the System Variable Grouping screen to create a data segment where (custom1=flowers.com) and another data segment for custom1=roses.com.

Screenshot:

You can even separate multiple values to do aggregation. For example of you had 40 websites/URLs and you wanted to collate 10 of them together and view the analysis for the 10 of them (as a single unit) you can separate them out with commas and create a data segment for the 10 of them:

Another option is to use the Banner Table analysis to automatically compare all the data (with the aggregate data) for each unique value of a custom variables.

Screenshot:

This will produce an excel report analyzing the data for each data segment and compare that to the overall data.

References:

Custom Variables
http://www.questionpro.com//help/131.html

Detailed Help on System Variable/Custom Variable Grouping/Segmentation
http://www.questionpro.com/help/301-inline.html

Detailed Help on Automatic Banner/Pivot Tables:
http://www.questionpro.com/help/301-inline.html

Thanks to a little nudge from a couple of our customers, we've made some improvements to the Action Alert system:
major areas of the system :

Here are the details:


Ability to create multiple alerts
Earlier the system had a limitation of only one alert per survey. This limitation has been removed. You can now create multiple alerts for the same survey.




Action Alert Email Body
The emails that go out themselves are formatted better and are far more presentable than the earlier ones. This is a little tricky because unlike browsers, different email clients (Outlook,Yahoo, Hotmail, Gmail) usually modify the HTML/Content of the email before presenting it to the users. This makes it a little more challenging to find the lowest common denominator and make sure that the email looks good on all these platforms.

Couple of quick export enhancements that have gone online over the last couple of days:

PowerPoint Export:

Open Ended Comments
Ability to specify if you want the Open-Ended Text comments as part of the download. This allows you to create a single comprehensive PPT file that has  both the analytical data  as well as the open-ended text data. There is still the issue of the a large number of comments in a single slide. At this point, we are putting all the comment data in a single slide. In the future we'll probably have an option to break the data into multiple slides. This does however increase the size of the PPT file considerably.



PowerPoint Templates:
We've included a standard set of PPT templates that you can use. Choose any template and the PPT file will use that template.

In the future we envision allowing for uploading a PPT template file and the system defaults to a custom template that you've uploaded.






Word Export:
We've also added in the option to download the presentation data in Word format. This becomes useful if you have a lot of open-ended text data. The Word document is a much better solution than the PPT file.





Detailed help for these upgrades are available here:
http://www.questionpro.com/help/372.html

OK, we admit it -- This functionality has been in "Coming Soon" mode for almost six months now. We finally managed to put some development resources into the email individual report functionality to get it done.


What we have so far:
Using the Response Editor, when viewing an individual response, you can quickly email it to someone else (or yourself)

When is it typically used?
Typically this could be used to send a copy of the response (with verbatim comments) to your boss or a stakeholder.

What is next in the pipeline?
The current plan is to enable the same report in multiple standard formats (PDF, Word etc.) This is in the works and should be released soon.


Screenshot:

We have expanded our logic/tools to include dynamic (inline/javascript) based comment boxes based on logic. The typical use-case is when you want to ask the user for open-ended text comments if they choose a particular option (or give you a low score.)

In the past, most users did this with the help of branching and skip logic. We've now added in the capability to do this _without_ going through the branching/skip logic tool.

Screenshot:



Detailed Help:
http://www.questionpro.com/help/471.html

As many of you have noticed (and commented) we've made some significant changes and updates to the email list management interface for survey delivery. Most of it is centered around usability but there are some functions that have been added:

What we've launched so far:

Automatic Duplicated checking and removal
Ability to View/Download Specific Email Addresses based on Status(Bounced/Active/Unsubscribe)
On-Click removal of Bounced and Duplicate email addreses

Screenshot:

Bulk Unsubscribe Option
When users email you personally to take them off the email list

Automated Import Tool:
Use this option if you have a different system of collecting email addresses and you'd like to integrate the upload of emails into QuestionPro. Simply send a pre-formatted CSV file as an attachment to a specified email address, and the QuestionPro system will do the rest -- Upload emails into the email list, and send out the survey to all of them.

Screenshot:

Where we are headed:
We'll be launching an expanded set of functionality by the end of the year, to accommodate the following:

• List Signup Widget (A Widget that you can post on site for easy email address collection)
• List Signup Page (A HTML Page, hosted by QuestionPro) for enabling users to directly signup with your list.
• Double-Opt-In verification and confirmation.

We are beta-testing a new Visualization (Logic/Flowchart) library to see how the branching logic is setup on a survey. To view the logic for your survey :

Detailed Help:
http://www.questionpro.com/help/456.html

We've added in a new feature into the "Draft/Collaboration" mode. The ability to add visual sticky notes to the survey. This feature is enabled when the survey is in "Draft/Collaboration" mode.

To learn more about Draft/Collaboration mode visit:
http://www.questionpro.com/help/391.html

Screenshot:

A new option as been added to the Side-By-Side Matrix question type: "Drop Down Menu" -- this option allows for displaying a drop down menu instead of a series of radio buttons for the Side-By-Side Matrix question type.

Detailed Help:
http://www.questionpro.com/help/461.html

One of the requests we've had from customers to enhance the System Variable based Grouping to include multiple criteria for a particular custom variable.

This is needed in cases where the custom variable is too granular. For example if the custom variable you are tracking is a Customer Zip Code, and you need to "roll" up data for a particular set of zip codes you can do that with this enhancement.

Screenshot:

Detailed Help Item:
http://www.questionpro.com/help/197.html

We are currently beta-testing two new tools that has been in the radar for quite some time:

1. A MS Word Importing Tool -- Automatically imports a survey in MS Word into QuestionPro.
2. A Branching Logic visualization tool.

Both these tools are in Beta mode.

To learn more about the MS Word Importing too, visit:
http://www.questionpro.com/help/454.html

To find out more about the Logic Visialization (Flowchart) tool goto:
Login->Edit Survey->Branching/Logic (Bottom Left Navigation)

We just launched a hot new tool for data-validation -- The "Reference Data" question type.

The Reference Data Question Type is used to collect/validate data against "standardized" databases -- for example US Zip Codes.

For example, if you wanted to ask users their Zip Code and wanted to validate (to make sure that the data entered is correct) against the standard US Postal Service Zip Code database you can use the Reference Data question type for this.

We've currently integrated with :

US Zip Code (Postal Service)
Canadian Postal Codes
Australian Post Codes

It turns out that for some countries this data is actually NOT in the public domain. In the UK the Royal Post has a copyright on this data and sells is commercially. The licensing of the data is too complicated for us to even deal with it.

Here is a survey that uses the Zip Code:

http://greenhousing.questionpro.com

References:

Reference Data Question Type
http://www.questionpro.com/help/399.html