Surveying Users

One of our Teams Objectives this year will require us to create at least one web survey form. There have be other instances where we have been asked to assist in creating a web surveys or tests, so I have been investigating possible options for expediting this. There are some good solutions for this purpose out there! One that struck me as extremely well thought through is PHPSurveyor. This is an open source product that is one of the best examples of this style of software development I have seen. The current stable version is PHPSurveyor 1.0 The tool appears to be robust and extremely functional with a “minimalist” interface that whilst not exactly intuitive only takes about an hour to get the hang of (It would be faster if someone was available to instruct you…).

The features of PHPSurveyor that really attract me are:

Whilst setup is not completely automated, very clear instructions are provided. In my Windows XP "test" environment, setup was straightforward and we did not experience much different in the Linux server environment we setup for production.

The survey user interface is clean of “branding” which is great!

Questions can be set to appear singularly or in groups (groups are really pages in this context).

There is a cool piece of functionality that allows questions to be dependent on an answer provided to an earlier question. This means that the user can be presented with questions that are relevant and not have to be presented with questions that they would have to ignore…

There is a ribbon gauge that advises the user of their progress through the questionnaire.

The reporting options for results and the exporting of results is straightforward.

This product is worth the trouble of implementing although users will need to have some support to initially get it to work.