More posts from Brittany

New Question Type Added: CAPTCHA

After many requests, we have now added one of the coolest CAPTCHA question types out there. A CAPTCHA is an image that is displayed that requires the participant to enter the letters they see in the image in order to continue to the next page of the survey.

We’re using a service called reCAPTCHA, and the best part about it is how it actually works. It not only works as a normal CAPTCHA (safeguarding against computer bots SPAMMING your survey), but it also gives back to the community.

You might ask, “How does something like a CAPTCHA question type give back to the community?” Well, the way it works is it gives the person filling out the CAPTCHA two words to type in.

One of the words has already been verified by the CAPTCHA and the CAPTCHA knows how to spell it correctly. Since it can verify the one word, if a bot were to try and type something in, it would know to kick that bot out.

The other word is from a page within a book that needs to be digitized, but a digital scanner is having a hard time understanding the handwriting and therefore can not turn it into a digital word. So the person filling out the CAPTCHA is actually helping create digitized versions of older books, so we can have them for many years to come. How cool is that?!?!

You can find out more about how the reCAPTCHA works here. If you have any questions about this question type, feel free to post it over on the forum!

SurveyGizmo on AskDaveTaylor.com

We recently had the privilege to answer a question that came up on Dave Taylor’s very popular Business, and Tech Support Q & A website, AskDaveTaylor.com. Dave is a friend of SurveyGizmo’s (we actually shared an office with him when we were first starting out), and when a survey question came up, he thought we could help his reader’s out.

So we took a stab at answering his reader’s question, “How Can I Embed a Survey on a Web Page or Blog?” Dave just posted our response today, so if you’re interested in how to embed the surveys you’re currently creating into your website, please check out the post over at AskDaveTaylor.com.

Thanks goes out to Dave for letting us answer!

New Survey Features: Partial Responses, Spell Check, Save and Continue, File Upload Questions

New survey features added to SurveyGizmo this week:

• New Feature: Individual Partial Responses can now be set to complete.
• New Feature: The login action now has an option to “mask” the input with an asterisk (*).
• New Feature: Ranking tables now have the option to “rank the top X” by leaving some column labels blank. Reports also reflect this change. Previously, a blank generated a column with no heading.
• New Feature: Save and Continue and Email Invite Only options can be used together.
• New Feature: Text fields with Date, Email, Min, Max or RegEx Validation now stop invalid input even if the questions are not required when submitting a page.
• New Feature: File Upload questions now show errors even if the question is not required.
• New Feature: The survey creator is now shown on the All Surveys page.
• New Feature: Date type text fields now validate the format of the date and also the validity of the day, month, & year.
• New Feature: SalesForce.com actions now show Success & Error logs in.
• New Feature: Default Value is now supported in Checkbox, Radio, and Drop-Down Menu question types. Separate multiple default values, such as in a checkbox, by a comma.
• Bug Fix: Spell check is now up and working again.

See the entire change log of survey software improvements.

Join Us for SurveyGizmo Book Club

It’s starting to look a lot like summer around here in Boulder, and you know what that means — summer reading!

We thought: a fun way to get all of our users as well as our SurveyGizmo-ers reading this summer would be to start a SurveyGizmo Book Club.

The first book we’ll be reading is, “Peak: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo from Maslow” by Chip Conley. Scott, our CEO, has been raving about the book ever since he read it a few weeks ago, so we thought, “Why not start off with a book someone already knows and loves?”

The book is setup into 3 different sections, one on employees, one on customers, and one on financial backing. It’s all about taking Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, and interpreting them in order to make your business an inspirational place to work for your employees, as well as give your customers a reason to keep coming back. Conley takes you through how he helped his company survive the dot-com bubble burst by applying what he learned from Maslow to his every day business. If you’d like to order the book or read more about it, here’s the link to the book’s Amazon page.

We would love it, if, as you read the book, you added your own thoughts in the comments section below. Let us know the ideas that you thought were awesome, the ideas you thought missed the mark, and everything in between. We’ll be adding our own comments as we work our way through the book, as well as having semi-formal meetings here at the new office.

Because this book is broken up into 3 separate sections, we thought we’d hold a few different meet-ups here (at our new office) to talk about it. Our first meet-up will be Wednesday, June 3, and we’ll talk about the very first section, which is all about employees.

If you’re in the Boulder/Denver area and would like to stop by, we’ll be holding it around 5PM, and we would love to have you! Otherwise, let us know your thoughts about the book in comments — we can’t wait to see what you guys think about this book!

We’ve Moved — Again! Third Annual Open House

As some of you may have heard, these past few weeks we have been moving into our newer, 3 times bigger, even brighter, with 3 times the amount of decks (see side photo of one of the decks), office. And we are all officially moved in and ready to invite you over!

We’re loving this new place, because it’s much much bigger and we now have more room to grow. And of course, moving to a new place, gives us an excuse to throw our Third Annual Open House Happy Hour (we’re big on the 3′s this year.)

We would love it if everyone could come check out our new office, and see why we love working here as much as we do. Come check out the artwork our SurveyGizmo kids created, our Customer Wow wheel of fortune, how creative we can all be with our new cubes, and of course — the ever important game room. We want you to come check out the office that helps us build a better product and team for all of our customers.

Oh yeah — did I mention that we bought a new grill, so we’ll be grilling burgers and brats all afternoon, and we’ll also have plenty of beverages to wash it all down.

Some of the details are below, but if you’d like more information and if you would like to RSVP, please check out the official invite.

Date: Friday, May 29
Time: 4PM – 7PM
Where: 3090 Sterling Circle, Suite 200, Boulder, CO 80301
View Larger Map

We can’t wait for all of you to check out the new office, meet all our new staff (we’ve added 6 new team members since the previous Open House), and take us on in Guitar Hero!

I hope to see you all there!