Online Surveys: Feedback Through Web 2.0

No matter who you are or where you work there’s always a need for other people’s opinions. Whether you are a small business that needs feedback on a product, or a major charity that wants to see what people think of your next campaign, there’s a need for feedback, and the best way to get it is with a survey.

Online surveys have been around for a while, but as the web has changed, so have online surveys, becoming more accessible, more customizable, and faster to deploy. This week we’ll look at the web 2.0 survey applications Zoomerang, SurveyMonkey, FluidSurveys, and MySurveyLab and see how each provides new accessibility and productivity to the survey process.

All of the web 2.0 survey applications are able to create surveys with custom questions and a variety of types of questions. Subscription services offer as many as 22 different types of questions, from true/false to write-ins, but all offered a range of options to cover your feedback needs. Sorting or making the answers random are common features as well.

Where survey applications really shine is in duplication and audience; with digital surveys, reproducing a survey is as easy as clicking a button, and reaching people is as simple as email or via a website. Say you needed to survey customers every six months to measure improvement, and your group has gotten larger in the six months. Regenerate the survey, add emails and you’re done. Real-time responses will come in, and with most applications, users are ale to see responses at-a-glance, or individually.

Some allow branching (also called skipping or conditional logic), which lets users change questions when the survey taker gives a certain response - imagine if you are trying to find out how users feel about the iPhone and you ask if they’ve seen one. If they answer “no” there’s little point in talking about it as though they had seen one, so this allows you to cater your surveys.

Whether a business is looking for feedback or testing the ground for a new product, surveys are an invaluable way to get feedback. We’ll be covering some of the better applications this week, but if you would like to get started with surveys, there is the Listio search: create+surveys.

Next in this series: MySurveyLab: Surveys And Tests Online

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Tags: business, create, feedback, manage, personal, polls, Surveys
Posted in: Surveys | Respond
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