Price-Performance Value - Dave Roe

> What does this product offer that the online tools do not?

A ridiculous-looking UI? I have only looked at the screen shots, but I am already put off by what looks like an un-organised mess. A product like this has a lot of functionality to squeeze in, but is there any reason that it all has to be bundled onto the same page?

/dave

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Thursday, June 09 2005 @ 10:40 AM PDT

Price-Performance Value - TrevorJacques

I agree that there's a lot on the same page. There are several pages/panes in The Surveyor, one of which is a listing, which is rather simpler. I've had to balance having all the information in one place vs. it being easy on the eye. As the product has grown, functions have been added, which all take up space. I'm aware that I'm pushing the boundary of attractiveness in the Detail pane, but, for the moment, I've found that in daily use it's best to have everything on one page.

I'm still getting the hang of using VersionTracker, so the same Detail image is present twice for The Surveyor. I can't find a way to delete the second one while I create one for the listing format. I'll get there.... :-)

Trevor

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Thursday, June 09 2005 @ 01:28 PM PDT

Price-Performance Value - TrevorJacques

Jeff Mincey wrote: either that or it is exclusively for those organizations with ungodly volume of surveys to process (in order for it to become cost effective).

Actually, you've hit on something. It was also designed for very complex, very long questionnaires. Sure, The Surveyor can be used for simple 20-question, or five-page questionnaires, but it's meant for more than that. Researchers who do many questionnaires, or questionnaires with a great many questions.

For example, I've just completed work on a 1,400-question, 76-page patient intake questionnaire for a doctor. We had to be able to both store both qualitative and quantitative data in MySQL,, but also produce textual reports for purposes of expert testimony in court. There's also full respondent management and respondent/doctor(admin) sections. There are also many, many child tables for this questionnaire, all of which have to be properly exported to SPSS, AND reported properly for the doctor's secretary to include in formal submissions. He also only wanted questions with non-empty replies to be put into the reports. Then there was making the format of the web pages look like the hospital web pages, etc., etc., etc..

The Surveyor creates all the code for this automatically. Full details in the manual (version 8.x out soon, but 7.1 covers most of the functions).

HTH.

Trevor.

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Thursday, June 09 2005 @ 01:47 PM PDT

Price-Performance Value - TrevorJacques

I feel that The Surveyor DOES add a lot more than other products, particulalry if you're running your own web server. Otherwise, I would not be working on it. :-)

If you'd like to contact me about The Surveyor, please don't hesitate to e-mail me at Trevor at the Videlicet dot com domain, or call me at 416 962 1040. Thanks.

Trevor

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Thursday, June 09 2005 @ 01:21 PM PDT

Price-Performance Value - davert

It is getting so that the term "SurveyMonkey" makes me cringe.

THis is a PROFESSIONAL survey program. SPSS output is one nice feature, but there's far more. If you want total control and fast-loading surveys, or if confidentiality is a major issue, this is the way to go. Expensive? Yes, but compare it with Perseus SurveySolutions, EZSurvey, and Snap, and suddenly it's reasonable; especially since it uses "real" databases, unlike SurveySolutions, which uses Access. It's also the ONLY one to run on a Mac.

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Friday, June 10 2005 @ 05:15 AM PDT

Price-Performance Value - TrevorJacques

Davert wrote: This is a PROFESSIONAL survey program. ...If you want total control and fast-loading surveys, or if confidentiality is a major issue, this is the way to go. ...compare it with Perseus SurveySolutions, EZSurvey, and Snap, and suddenly it's reasonable; especially since it uses "real" databases, ...It's also the ONLY one to run on a Mac.

Thank you. I couldn't have said it much better. :-) And you're not even on the payroll ;-)

BTW, The Surveyor also runs on a PC. :-)

Jeff was concerned about price/cost:

The price of a product is usually very much less than its cost to you/your organisation. I usually figure that if a product saves you more than about three days over the time you use it, then it's worthwhile: 3 days times 8 hours times $50/hour = $1200. If you're just doing one simple questionnaire, there are likely other solutions for you. If you have a large number of data points, say greater than about 100, or you're going to be doing many questionnaires with about 10-20 questions each, then you'll want something complete and easy to use, like The Surveyor. If you have a complex questionnaire with large reporting requirements both during the design phase of the survey instrument (i.e. the questions themselves) and for analysis, then you'll need a professional tool, again, like The Surveyor.

There are other issues, too, such as the time it take to write the SPSS scripts to populate the variable and value labels, as well as a quick frequencies sanity check of the collected data. The Surveyor creates all these in a few seconds for you, with the click of a button.

If, for your Institutional Review Board (IRB), you need a Word-format documentation of your questionnaire and the potential replies to each question, can you get this report easily from the tool, or do you have to write it yourself the slow way? What would it take to write/format one for your questionnaire and how much time would it save you to simply click a button to have the documentation written for you?

Another question when looking into tools for web surveys: have the psychometrics of the layout of the web pages been properly taken into consideration? Many of the available tools do not consider this issue.

There are many, many things to think about when putting a questionnaire on the web. :-)

Trevor.

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Saturday, June 11 2005 @ 06:43 AM PDT

Price-Performance Value - TrevorJacques

Davert wrote: This is a PROFESSIONAL survey program. ...If you want total control and fast-loading surveys, or if confidentiality is a major issue, this is the way to go. ...compare it with Perseus SurveySolutions, EZSurvey, and Snap, and suddenly it's reasonable; especially since it uses "real" databases, ...It's also the ONLY one to run on a Mac.

Thank you. I couldn't have said it much better. :-) And you're not even on the payroll ;-)

BTW, The Surveyor also runs on a PC. :-)

Jeff was concerned about price/cost:

The price of a product is usually very much less than its cost to you/your organisation. I usually figure that if a product saves you more than about three days over the time you use it, then it's worthwhile: 3 days times 8 hours times $50/hour = $1200. If you're just doing one simple questionnaire, there are likely other solutions for you. If you have a large number of data points, say greater than about 100, or you're going to be doing many questionnaires with about 10-20 questions each, then you'll want something complete and easy to use, like The Surveyor. If you have a complex questionnaire with large reporting requirements both during the design phase of the survey instrument (i.e. the questions themselves) and for analysis, then you'll need a professional tool, again, like The Surveyor.

There are other issues, too, such as the time it take to write the SPSS scripts to populate the variable and value labels, as well as a quick frequencies sanity check of the collected data. The Surveyor creates all these in a few seconds for you, with the click of a button.

If, for your Institutional Review Board (IRB), you need a Word-format documentation of your questionnaire and the potential replies to each question, can you get this report easily from the tool, or do you have to write it yourself the slow way? What would it take to write/format one for your questionnaire and how much time would it save you to simply click a button to have the documentation written for you?

Another question when looking into tools for web surveys: have the psychometrics of the layout of the web pages been properly taken into consideration? Many of the available tools do not consider this issue.

There are many, many things to think about when putting a questionnaire on the web. :-)

Trevor.

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Saturday, June 11 2005 @ 06:46 AM PDT