9 New Theme Templates!

SurveyGizmo has nine more shiny new theme templates for your use. Add a little color to your life or go with something simpler. It’s all here. All of these templates can be configured on the Look & Feel Tab and include simple editable fields to modify the following

• Logos: Add your logo into the header. (upload logos in the your Files & Templates area)
• Logo Alt text: Improve survey accessibility by adding alt text to your logos.
• Width: Change the width of the content area.
• Footer text: Modify the footer text to include your copyright, company help line, etc.
• Width: Change the width for different uses.
• Submit, Next and Back Button Text: Configure the text labels on buttons. Very useful for non-English surveys.

If you find any challenges using the survey templates or have requests for other templates that would improve your surveys please let us know in the comments.

• Modern Blue-Grey

  

• Café au lait

  

• Tuscan Red

  

• Green Tea

  

• Beige Boxes

  

• Smoke

  

• Forest Greens

  

• Gizmo Blue-Gold

  

• Sunburst Orange

  

Surveys: For Fun or Profit?

Surveys can be fun! Newspapers, TV programs, radio shows and the like love to quote survey results because audiences find them entertaining. We enjoy learning other people’s personal habits or political views and seeing where we fit in. (Check out SurveyGizmo’s ipoll application (ipoll.surveygizmo.com) for some fun examples.)

But surveys are also a critical component of decision-making for companies looking to make a profit. They provide customer, prospect and employee information crucial for keeping businesses running. So, knowing whether you’re conducting a survey for fun or profit before you run the survey can greatly affect how you conduct your survey.

Most “fun” surveys do not need to follow accepted practices for successful surveys, and the time and expense to create an accurate survey is not warranted. In fact, the entertainment factor is often higher for a biased survey.

For example, years ago advice columnist Dear Abby ran a poll asking parents, “If you had it to do all over again, would you have children?” She received more than 10,000 responses, and 75% of the respondents said they would not have children if they could start over. The ensuing uproar (how could parents say such a thing?!) led to the commission of a more “scientific” survey using accepted practices. The results of that study showed that 95% of parents would have children if they had it to do over again.

Political surveys, on the other hand, tend to want to be more accurate, because their entertainment value is closely tied to the accuracy of the surveys. The Gallup organization has made a good business out of performing rigorous survey methods in their work.

Compare two recent excerpts from USA TODAY:

“According to the latest AP-Ipsos national poll: Among Republicans surveyed, 23% ‘can’t or won’t say which candidate they would back,’ from their party’s contenders, ‘a jump from the 14% who took a pass in June.’ Rudy Giuliani leads the list of those who are chosen, with 21% support.”

“The AP-Ipsos results aren’t backed up by the latest numbers from the Gallup Poll. Today, Gallup’s Lydia Saad reports that 10% of Republicans responded with ‘none’ or ‘no opinion’ when Gallup asked which of the GOP candidates they support. In Gallup’s latest survey, Giuliani leads among Republicans with 30%.”

So, which poll is correct? There is no way to truly know unless we look at the methods used. As we learned in the Dear Abby example, the methods affect the results!

So, are your surveys for fun or profit? Businesses, we hope, strive for accuracy, but sometimes using accepted practices isn’t worth the time and money involved. Decide what purpose your survey will serve, and then you’ll know if you should strictly follow accepted practices. Next time I’ll cover some of these basic accepted practices for surveys that everyone should know.

New: Full Support of Non-English Characters

We are happy to announce that SurveyGizmo finally supports non-English characters completely as of this past weekend. For those of you located or who survey outside of the US, this should be welcome news indeed!

Previously, certain sections of the SurveyGizmo application would “garble” non-English characters — making your surveys unattractive and unreadable. Thanks to a lot of help from our customers in the Netherlands, we were finally able to solve this problem.

Also, we are looking for volunteers to help us translate SurveyGizmo into other languages. If this sounds like a project that interests you, please let us know. We are giving away free lifetime Professional accounts to individuals who help us translate our tool into a new language.

Best of luck on all your survey projects!

-The SurveyGizmo Team

Special Note: If you currently have a survey in SurveyGizmo that uses these characters, please check your survey over carefully. Our switch to become an international survey tool required us to switch to UTF-8 (a character code standard) from ISO-8859. Because of this you should confirm that your survey looks good now in UTF8 (only if you have surveys published in languages other than English). If you see any problems, just update the question that looks garbled once last time - and you will be good to go.

New Servers: Faster reporting, faster surveys & improved security!

Over last weekend and Monday night, we at SurveyGizmo migrated the heart of our services to a new network of servers in San Antonio, Texas. It was necessary to move to better, faster machines because of the huge number of new customers who have started using our services in the past two months.

I’m happy to say that the migration is now complete. Thanks to everyone who pointed out migration issues over the last few days. We have a few minor changes that we will make over this weekend to ensure stability and make good use of the power of these new machines.

Here are the benefits of the new servers. I’m sure you will agree that it was worth it!

Improved Speed & Security

Your survey data is now safer than it has ever been before! Our special server setup now keeps your data safe behind a firewall, stored on its own set of databases and encrypted storage. This means there is no direct access to your data from the internet, and the format of the data is not easy to reconstruct even in a worst case scenario. Our application servers and API connect to these servers over a very fast private connection. This, combined with a generous amount of memory and more processors, allows us to make SurveyGizmo really fly! (Some speed improvements will require a few changes to the application after the migration.)

Thanks again to everyone who helped iron out small bugs and glitches during this migration period. We will work through the weekend looking for any remaining issues. If you find any, as always let us know and we will jump on them!

Social Networking comes to iPoll

We have had a big response to our iPoll application. There have been well over 10,000 hits, and hundreds of users have created polls in the past few days. Now we have added a social networking aspect to iPoll. You can ask the world to cast their vote on your poll, and the world in turn can promote or demote your question based on how worthy they think it is. Current and high ranking polls will float to the top of the list.

Try it out below — you’ll need Firefox, Safari, or IE 7 to use it. IE 6 users should be upgrading anyways ;-)

Yes, you can still mark polls not to be public and send them to just friends, coworkers or customers. Those uses are still fully embraced, but now you can ask a broader audience or even just burn a few minutes surfing and voting while you wait for your train.

http://ipoll.surveygizmo.com

Happy Polling!

10 Tips for Developing iPhone Applications

A few days ago we got iPhone fever with the rest of the world. We decided to build a SurveGizmo Mobile Poll application for the iPhone, which you can view at mobile.surveygizmo.com. We learned a few things about developing Web 2.0 applications for the iPhone worth sharing!

Various sources like Gizmodo, FiGMA, and MyiTablet and were reporting iPhone development tips from the recent Apple Developer Conference (WWDC). These tips were helpful but a little misleading. Actually playing with an iPhone changed our approach. Here are some tips we picked up.

10 (+1) Tips for iPhone Applications

#1 Content width

Web pages on the iPhone default to a birds-eye view. This is great when you are browsing CNN.com, but iPhone applications should fill up the entire screen without requiring the user to zoom in and out. Many of the content apps are created to take 100% of the screen and scale down appropriately, but we found this didn’t work well for iPoll, which is just a small page with a form. Here’s the solution, set the viewport metatag. This allows the developer to work in a div of fixed size and tells the iPhone how to render the page.

<meta name=”viewport” content=”width=320″ />

#2 Content height

The iPhone browser is designed to scroll with your finger not browser or div scroll bars, so this means that you don’t want to use fixed height designs. We had a lot of trouble with overflow CSS property. We suggest you leave that property alone and let the iPhone do the work.

# 3 Increase the size of form controls

The iPhone uses fingers for making selections. It’s very intuitive but it also makes spacing and sizing your form elements very important, especially for radio buttons and checkboxes. Here is some good news. Safari on the iPhone accepts width and height settings for radio and checkbox controls! It makes them larger and easier to select with your finger. Yes, you can do this with images too, but consider your bandwidth. iPhone apps should be written to work on EDGE.

# 4 Label Tags - still do not work in Safari

Sadly the label tag still does not work correctly on the iPhone. It would be nice, but you’ll have to code around this.

#5 Cache? — Kinda

The iPhone browser does cache content… but it doesn’t help the download speed much. We will do more testing on this, but it seems that every page load creates separate requests for cached content for every external resource (even if previously cached). Likely to do header checks. That’s fine and dandy, but on EDGE it slows things down and your page will not render until all external resources are loaded. So keep your external resource links to a minimum. Use modern design tricks for displaying multiple images from one file, only include the JS libraries that you need, etc.

We also suggest building multiple UI’s into a single file and using JS/CSS to navigate between them rather than moving between pages.

#6 Web 2.0 Javascript libraries - use with caution

The iPhone speed over EDGE can be slow, very slow. We wrote our first version of our Mobile Polls app with Prototype and script.aculo.us, but loading 50-100k of JS proved to not be terribly practical, at least for us. The application was too sluggish to be effective.

#7 Web 2.0 Animation effects

We experienced latency issues that seem to negate the benefit of web 2.0 animation effects like color highlighting, slides, accordions, etc. The effects didn’t seem to keep up and made some UIs unusable.

This is not a problem with the iPhone, really, but be aware that effects occurring after the “onload” event may not render well. They will be competing with whatever mechanism the WebKit uses to thumbnail the page, and you’ll get choppy animation.

#8 Use tab-enabled form elements

The iPhone makes good use of tabbed form controls. The keyboard has a “next” and “back” button for tabbing between them without losing focus on the keyboard. So, use elements like form fields and anchors for interaction rather than divs with onclick handlers. Your users will thank you!

#9 iPhone HTTP User Agent identification

As Mac Rumors reported the iPhone sends this header.

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A538a Safari/419.3

This allows for serving custom content or alternate styles sheets etc. iPhone Geek has already created a helpful php iPhone detection script.

#10 Hover Effects — don’t bother

Since there is no mouse, hover effects don’t work. You’ll need to build UI’s that provide other kinds of clear feedback or at least don’t rely on it. Make your interactive elements very clear.

Bonus Tip (just added) - The “Share” button alternative

The iPhone browser has a feature that Safari does not, a ‘Share’ button that emails your current web address to contacts in your iPhone. Dandy! Sadly, though, the button only appears when editing an URL, not when browsing. Our application needed this functionality (actually, we wanted access to the contact database so we could generate text messages), but we didn’t want to teach people to use the Share feature.

So, remember this ‘old’ trick? Use an old fashioned “mailto” link with &subject= and &body=. This allowed us to provide the same function with a single click on the web app itself, plus we could include some default text.

If you want to use multiple lines you need to use <BR> tags, not escaped line breaks. The iPhone email client is HTML based… it doesn’t respect \n breaks passed in the URL.

Happy iPhone Developing!

iPoll.SurveyGizmo: Mobile Polls for the iPhone

Like thousands of other people across the US, the team here at SurveyGizmo got a bad case of iPhone fever last Friday. We didn’t intend on actually buying the iPhone ourselves — but it was too slick to resist during our visit to the Apple store.

To celebrate the iPhone (and convince our bookkeeper that is was a business expense), we created our own iPhone Application, called iPoll. You can use iPoll to create short one questions polls on your iPhone and send them out to your friends, co-workers and iPhone contacts. It’s totally free.

Do you have an iPhone?

You can try our app by browsing to http://ipoll.surveygizmo.com (don’t forget to bookmark it). This app is *very* lightweight — you can use it over AT&T’s network without getting old and gray waiting for page loads.

For those of you without iPhone, you can still use the application. The iPhone image below is actually a working copy. (The only difference is that the iPhone itself never displays scroll bars.)

One caveat: This was written for the iPhone — so you’ll need Firefox, Safari, or IE 7 to use it. IE 6 users should be upgrading anyways ;-)

COOL! What can I do with iPoll?

Here are some ideas!

• Build your poll on the fly. You can use an iPhone, a web browser, and quite possibly other web-enabled cell phones. You can visit this page or go to http://iPoll.SurveyGizmo.com
• Email your poll to friends, family, coworkers, customers, etc.
• Watch the will of the mob, possibly change your mind, or help make a decision

Here are some examples of what you could do with a mobile poll

• Decide where to go to lunch?
• Who will win the next presidential election
• Where should we meet for happy hour?
• What feature should we build into iPolls next?
• Who will win American Idol?
• Who should be prom queen?

Happy Polling!