There are two different Ruby gems out there right now to choose from:

survey-gizmo-ruby Ruby Gem

Kabari Hendrick released this Ruby gem to integrate Ruby with the SurveyGizmo API v.1 using an ActiveModel style interface. It interfaces with survey API resources such as surveys, questions, pages, options, and responses. It also supports all of the actions provided by the API: get, create, update, delete, and get list. There is also error handling.

You can follow these links to check out the survey-gizmo-ruby repository, see an extended usage example, or read the documentation.

Kabari’s company, Lab42, uses it in a few different places, such as this survey tool.

surveygizmo Ruby Gem

Bobby Uhlenbrock with Ample built this Ruby Gem, which currently focuses heavily on pulling response data from the SurveyGizmo API.

Bobby told us, “My goal was to make this as easy to drop into an app as the Twitter gem. Therefore, if you’ve ever used the Twitter gem, this should make immediate sense.”

You can follow the links below to see the surveygizmo Ruby Gem repository, as well as check out the documentation.

**We’ve also added both of these gems to our Survey API Resources page to make them easy to find in the future.

What’s Next

Both developers told us that their gems weren’t yet finished, and could use some help in the form of contributors, bug-finders, etc…so if you’re a Ruby developer who wants to make it easy to integrate your apps with SurveyGizmo, go get involved!

We love it when people build cool things with our API – thanks to Bobby and Kabari for getting these started! If you’ve used these Ruby gems (or the SurveyGizmo API) to build something great, please drop us an email and let us know! We’d love to talk to you more about it.

Yes, you heard that correctly, we just redid and revamped our SurveyGizmo Apple Dashboard Widget.

What does this mean for you?

The Survey Widget is now faster and sleeker, so you’ll be able to keep track of your survey response counts instantly when you’re in front of your computer (as long as you have an internet connection, of course).

The widget lets you view how all your surveys are doing throughout the day. With an easy to use drop-down menu to switch from survey to survey, you can keep track of response counts, completed surveys, partially completed surveys, and the number of disqualified respondents.

To install the widget, just head over to our Survey Widget page and click on the install file.

We know you love having as much information as possible at your fingertips, and we hope that these new improvements to the Survey Widget for Apple Dashboard will help bring it to you even faster.

As always, we love hearing from our users about how they’re using our product, so if you’ve used the widget in the past and are upgrading to the new widget now, or if you’re just trying the new widget for the first time, we would love to hear about in the comments!

Heat mapping helps you understand the impact of graphical or textual components within an advertisement. We all know certain locations garner more resonance than others, but how great would it be to test out an ad before publishing it?

I then started to think about advertising agencies. Knowing how to best position and market products and services is what clients expect, right? But how do they reach target audiences quickly within budget and deadline?

Well, SurveyGizmo now partnered with Cint can help do that. Instant market research through online sampling is a tremendous resource for getting the insight you need when you need it.

Cint has a unique model. Research buyers and panel owners, like media groups or even soccer moms, come to the Cint Panel Exchange, a transparent, open marketplace, to buy and sell consumer opinions. Because Cint doesn’t own any panels, all communities are affinity-based and highly engaged.

So, how does this help with ad campaigns?

With access to consumers, concept tests can be generated to analyze the perception of new concepts, products, etc. even before they launch. Compare different branding alternatives in a study generally consisting of 300 answers or create a pitch test to measure perceptions of a brand before talking about it with clients.

And here is where the fun begins. Launch a SurveyGizmo heat map survey of your ad by determining your target audience and adding Cint sampling capability. Instantly access the insight you need to best optimize ad space.

With the busiest quarter of the year fast approaching, competing to broadcast the best message in the best way matters more than ever. Having a tool to help assess the impact of my ads gives me an advantage over the competition and now you have it too…unless, you’re my competition in which case you never read this. :)

For those of you who don’t know it, Jive Software makes business intelligence social. Think of it as the ‘glue’ that holds together an organization – it lets you share relevant data, organize projects, and collaborate between users across an entire enterprise.

The collaboration allowed by Jive Software’s dashboard-centric approach seems like the perfect place to share survey results – so that’s just what we’ve done. Using the SurveyGizmo survey API, we’ve partnered with Jive to natively integrate our application with the Jive platform.

The SurveyGizmo Jive App allows you to access your SurveyGizmo dashboard and reporting from within Jive. It’s now incredibly easy to see and share results with collaborators across your company who have the app installed. From within the Jive app you now have easy access to work with data from all your SurveyGizmo surveys.

To add the SurveyGizmo Jive App to your Jive dashboard, simply login to Jive and head to the Jive Apps Market. From there, you’ll be able to install the SurveyGizmo app with one click.

Jive is just one of the partners using SurveyGizmo’s API to enrich their applications – we’ve partnered with several companies like Mailchimp, Survey Deck, WordPress and more to bring SurveyGizmo’s data into their apps.

Interested in finding ways to integrate your systems directly with SurveyGizmo? Check out SurveyGizmo Developer’s Corner for resources to help you integrate with SurveyGizmo using our API.

Don’t have your own development team? No problem. Talk to our Professional Services team, who can easily integrate our application with your systems for you!

It’s called the Developer’s Corner and you can check it out over here: http://developer.surveygizmo.com/

It’s your one-stop shop for getting documentation on the new REST API, ask questions and have a direct conversation with the developers who created the API at SurveyGizmo and other developers working on integrations, keep up-to-date with the latest releases through the blog, and eventually it will be a place to buy and sell widgets you create to integrate with SurveyGizmo.

To go along with the Developer’s Corner, we’ll be hosting a webinar on using the REST API, called:

Creating new Custom Question Types in SurveyGizmo
Learn how to use the new custom framework to create and report on your own custom question types.

Join us Friday, April 22nd from 10AM – 11AM EDT (GMT -4) – Register now

There are only 100 spots available for the webinar and will fill up quickly, so please register as soon as you can.

We’re planning big things for the Developer’s Corner so if you’re looking to create an integration or are just more interested in using the API, you’ll want to head over there.

We use ZenDesk for our support ticket system here at SurveyGizmo, and in the process we have integrated our customer feedback survey directly into the system. The only requirements for this integration are a ZenDesk account and any SurveyGizmo account (though for some additional link branding, we recommend the Pro or Enterprise plans).

The goal is to get feedback from the customer once a support issue has been resolved, so we can better get feedback about how well our customer service team is doing. You could setup many types of surveys and trigger them at different times within ZenDesk. Maybe a welcome email that collects additional information about an email sent to a specific department (such as billing). The options are completely up to you. The following example assumes you are getting customer feedback when a request is solved. You might also like to attach a survey link to the email footer of ALL emails. This is helpful in case a customer want s to provide feedback on the length of time it’s taking to resolve an issue.

In ZenDesk

• Select Manage from the ZenDesk menu and choose Triggers and email notifications
• If you already have a trigger for a Solved ticket, you can edit the existing trigger. This example assumes you are creating a new one, so click Add Trigger
• Setup the following recommended conditions:

  • Status | Changed to | Solved

  • Comment is... | Public

  This ensures that the email is sent only when an issue is deemed resolved and a comment was added (this last condition is optional).

• The next step is the ‘Perform These Actions’ section:

  • Notify User | (requester)

  • Email Subject:

    [{{ticket.account}}] Re: {{ticket.title}}

  • Email body (adjust wording as needed):

    Your request (#{{ticket.id}}) has been deemed solved.  Let us know how we did!
    http://YOUR-SURVEYGIZMO-LINK/?rep={{ticket.assignee.first_name}}+{{ticket.assignee.last_name}}
     
    To review, comment and reopen the request, follow the link below:
    http://{{ticket.url}}
     
    {{ticket.public_comments_formatted}}

This is an example of what we use, but the key area for you is the survey link. You will want to replace http://YOUR-SURVEYGIZMO-LINK/ with your survey link (Get this using the instructions below). The second portion, starting with the question mark ( ? ), is a query string. This information is automatically collected by SurveyGizmo (more on using this later). It allows you to automatically associate the ticket’s assignee to that feedback. We’ve used the variable name ‘rep’ in this case. For consistency, later instructions will assume you are also using ‘rep’. You could also pass in any ticket information like ticket ID, type, external ID, customer or organization name, etc.

In SurveyGizmo

You can create a customer feedback survey from scratch or use one of the pre-made templates we provide when you are creating a new survey (our example). Once the survey is created, you can Launch that survey, presenting you with a selection of links on the Publish tab. Here are a few examples:

All plan levels:

http://www.surveygizmo.com/s/34173/support-survey/

Professional and above (Branded Subdomains):

http://surveygizmo.support.sgizmo.com/

Enterprise level plans:

http://surveys.yourdomain.com/support/

Replace the link in the Email body example above with your survey’s link.

Pro Tip: For Internet Explorer 6 compatibility, make sure the links ends with a forward slash ( / ).

What else do I setup in the survey itself?

When your respondents click on that link, they will be presented with your survey, automatically passing to the survey the assignee’s full name. Within your survey, your very first question may be an open textfield question asking the respondent to enter their support representative’s name. Within SurveyGizmo, you can set the Default Value of this question as the following:

[%%GET_rep]

This special merge code is getting the representative’s name that was passed in when they clicked the link, placing that in the box automatically. This saves your respondents time while still allowing them to change the name if they wish. Be advised, if you changed ‘rep’ in the Solved email link above, you need to change it within that merge code as well.

Congratulations, you’ve now setup a very simple and elegant integration between SurveyGizmo and ZenDesk for your customer feedback survey! If you need help setting up your survey to accept your Zendesk info grap a SurveyGizmo account, build your survey and then drop our customer support a note!

Just a quick note to let everyone know that tomorrow several updates to the API will be going live at 5pm MT. We are adding five new functions to the survey API — and making several small modifications to the existing calls. Keep an eye on the API documentation page at 5pm on July 30th for the latest changes (this release will be version 1.5).

Here is a quick summary of the changes:

New Call: sgAddContact – This call will add or update (upsert) a contact to an email invitation in SurveyGizmo.

New Call: sgSingleSend – This call will add or update (upsert) a contact to an existing email invitation in SurveyGizmo — it will also send them the initial invite message for that campaign.

New Call: sgCreateSurvey – This call, available at the Enterprise level, will allow you to create a survey based on an XML schema you provide in the call.

New Call: sgCopySurvey – This call, available at the Enterprise level, will allow you to copy a survey that exists in your account.

New Call: sgSetSurveyStatus – This call can be used to launched and closed surveys programatically.

Also, we have added a limit on the number of records that can be pulled with each the sgGetResponseList call. The API call will now limit any one query to 500 responses at a time. To make polling our service easier, we now order the records newest to oldest and you can use our new “start” parameter to loop through your entire data. Please see our updated documentation for this function.

Happy Surveying!

In the meantime, you can still do some pretty wicked stuff. The Orange Country Register found us a few months ago with exactly that in mind. Check out their OC Political Pulse page. They use SurveyGizmo to build surveys and collect responses, then render the results in a custom Adobe Flex application built by their crack team of programmers. They are able to allow visitors to drill down into polls and see political data in demographic slices.

BTW, we don’t restrict access to the API. Even Free users can build apps against it. So if you have a particular survey itch that needs to be scratched for your web site, sign up for a free account and give it a whirl.

But that’s okay – our survey software is now iPhone & iPad-enabled! At any account level, you can now optimize your surveys for iPhone, iPad, and other mobile platforms.

Enterprise and Dedicated accounts also have the ability to auto-detect mobile browsers and serve up an appropriate mobile version of an existing survey. This means you can show different versions of the same survey to someone on a desktop and someone on an iPad or iPhone.

Lastly, you can manage your online surveys from your iPad or iPhone. Our site is optimized for mobile browsers, so whether you’re using an iPad, iPhone, or something else, you can still get realtime updates on the go.

Creating and managing iPhone and iPad surveys is now easier than ever. Grab your iPad and give it a try!

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.

Happy Polling!

But that’s okay – our survey software is now iPhone & iPad-enabled! At any account level, you can now optimize your surveys for iPhone, iPad, and other mobile platforms.

Enterprise and Dedicated accounts also have the ability to auto-detect mobile browsers and serve up an appropriate mobile version of an existing survey. This means you can show different versions of the same survey to someone on a desktop and someone on an iPad or iPhone.

Lastly, you can manage your online surveys from your iPad or iPhone. Our site is optimized for mobile browsers, so whether you’re using an iPad, iPhone, or something else, you can still get realtime updates on the go.

Creating and managing iPhone and iPad surveys is now easier than ever. Grab your iPad and give it a try!

A few days ago we got iPhone fever with the rest of the world. We decided to build a SurveyGizmo 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!