The online surveys produced by the system are based on the latest HTML standards (XHTML), fully accessible (up to AAA) and can be completed online by people with virtually any browser or operating system. Depending on your choice of design, they could also be used on PDAs and other mobile devices.

Optional incorporation of customisable access key functionality, progress bar and back button allows you to set the usability features based on the people you expect to be completing the survey.

Each survey submission is tagged with a unique reference number. The number is automatically included on the thank-you page after a survey has been completed. This unique reference number is not only useful when responding to correspondence/queries but also helps your organisation to meet various regulatory requirements.

Since surveys are created by you, the types of questions, number of questions and design of the pages are all decided by you. The surveys created can be extremely simple asking for an email address and comments or can be multiple pages with lots of questions, only some of which requiring a response. Most features can be optionally included based on the purpose of the specific survey and profile of the expected users. Available features include:

• Introductory text
• Pagination (multi-step surveys)
• Type of the questions (e.g. free-text, radio button choices etc)
• Accessibility options such as access keys
• Response validation
• Text between questions (e.g. hints, introductions/explanations, examples)
• Mandatory versus optional questions
• 'Thank-you' text
• Follow on site address

The design of the survey can be specified individually and this allows one system to add surveys to all your websites, even if they are branded differently. For example, the same system can create surveys for all the following sites:

• Public websites
• Intranets
• Extranets
• Client-optimised systems (e.g. WebTV, PDAs)

The surveys application makes it extremely easy to create new surveys requiring no technical knowledge. Free sample surveys are provided which can be copied and then edited as required. Surveys already created can also be copied and edited as required so it is extremely easy to make a similar one.

Surveys can be previewed as they are being built and published only when they are complete.

A library of common questions is included. Questions can be selected from the library and then modified as required. Alternately, questions can be built from scratch by selecting from within the following list of standard objects:

• Text/number box
• Text areas/multi-line input
• Radio buttons
• Checkboxes
• Select lists
• Hidden fields

Questions can be marked mandatory and grouped as appropriate, either within a single page or across multiple pages. Default values can also be specified.

Validation options are flexible and cover the main types of field validation such as:

• Email addresses
• Text of a specific length
• Numeric
• Money
• Dates
• Integers
• Website addresses

An unlimited number of notes, comments, examples and other text can be added throughout the survey. A simple what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) editor is included to allow the text to be formatted as required. The message that appears when a survey is successfully submitted is also fully customisable.

Access to administration is permission-based and secure.

It is possible to specify that the content of a completed survey is automatically sent to specific people (to, cc, bcc). The "from" address which will be used for any emails relating to a specific survey can also be specified. Specifying the "from" address is particularly useful if the contents of the survey is sent to the user upon submission since they may try to reply to that email.

The maximum number of submissions can be set so that the survey is automatically removed from the website when that number is reached. This is ideal for statistical analysis and reduces administration overhead.

Surveys are maintained on a real-time basis. This means that you can quickly make surveys available, make changes to existing surveys, activate and inactivate them. Since the created surveys are not available for use until they are published they can be created and made available for internal comments and review, allowing multiple people to work on a survey before it is approved and published.

Simple reporting is available from within the administrative interface and both graphical and text-based reporting is available. Data can also be exported in common formats (XLS and XML) for integration and analysis in other systems.

Surveys can easily be integrated with other systems in a variety a ways:

• A survey can be a stand-alone page, a 'pop-up' from an existing page or integrated within an existing CMS or website.
• Data gathered can be exported and imported into other systems from statistical analysis systems to database and even Microsoft^® Office for use in mail merges.
• Upon completion, the user can be sent to another system/URL for additional processing. All the information gathered is automatically passed to the specified URL. This might be useful to register a competition winner for example.

Continue to Compatibility and Accessibility

Back to the top of this page