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How iPad Surveys are Changing Political Polling

Kipp Chambers — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 20:19:04 +0000

Here we are in the midst of election season…which means that whether you’re a Democrat, a Republican, or an Independent, chances are you’re going to be hearing a lot about political polls over the next 11 months.

Over the past few years, technology has really shaken up the polling world. It started with the revelation that more than 1 in 4 Americans have given up their land line in favor of mobile phones. In response, Rasmussen Reports (who pioneered the use of automated phone polling techniques) adjusted their polling methods to include both phone polling and online surveys to reach those who have abandoned traditional land lines. Other polling services adopted similar techniques.

And that’s just one of the many ways technology is affecting the polling landscape. So we asked ourselves – how can technology make the political data collection world more efficient? Here are a few ways we came up with:

iPad Surveys & Exit Polls

One way to make political polls more efficient is to simply change the method you use to collect data. The iPad has had a huge impact on the world of mobile surveys – it only makes sense that it could improve exit polling as well.

Currently, most exit polls are conducted via pen and paper, which has worked well for years. Interviewers phone in results three times a day, and note the demographic data of the voters who refuse to participate.

Today, by using an iPad survey app in place of pen and paper, you can quickly and easily record data to a server. Real-time data updates allow polling organizations to see what’s happening in the moment, rather than waiting on their polling staff to report in 3 times per day. Just set up an iPad with a quick kiosk survey, and you’re on your way.

But what about the demographic component that pollsters report? Again, there’s an answer in the form of an iPad survey. By keeping a tally on an iPad or iPhone (using a tool like our Gesture Tally question type), pollsters can easily keep track of different characteristics of the people polled (or not polled, for that matter).

Using iPad Surveys to Collect Digital Petitions

Additionally, ballot initiatives across the U.S. are on the rise…and in order to get on the ballot, you need petition signatures. Collecting signatures by hand requires careful validation of each signature, as well as the name and address of the signee (which is a tedious task – something that most petition collectors are all-too-aware of). So why not make your petition collection digital?

With an iPad, a SurveyGizmo survey, and SurveyGizmo’s awesome Signature Capture question type, organizations can collect signatures from people on the street. Respondents can either sign the iPad using their fingers, or you can offer an iPad Stylus (if your respondents feel more comfortable signing with that).

By using an iPad survey and an online survey tool to collect petition signatures, organizations gain tremendous efficiency. All responses will be automatically synced to the server, and can then be quickly scanned to remove duplicates. This streamlines the process, yields better data, and makes everybody’s job a lot easier.

As the election season progresses, technology will continue to affect polling and data collection in numerous other ways. From computerized voting to polling, what other ways can you see technology changing the political landscape in 2012?

Image courtesy of Denise Cross – Flickr, Creative Commons (Attribution)

Manage your Online Surveys From your Mobile Device

Julie Jensen — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 01:04:16 +0000

Being away from your computer doesn’t mean you can’t manage your SurveyGizmo account. No matter where you are, you can check the status of your projects, monitor responses and see summary reports so you can track the success of your survey.

If you’re a SurveyGizmo customer, you can access your account from your phone. Using your mobile device, go to SurveyGizmo.com – you will see the Mobile version of our Home Page – just log in like you normally do. There’s nothing to download or install to get started, and it works on any mobile device with a web browser, such as a phone, iPad or other tablet.

From your web-enabled mobile device, you can manage your projects:

Access your overview page and manage surveys
Preview and Launch surveys
See number of responses
Review individual responses and sort responses
View “Data at a Glance” reports with pie & bar charts
Close your survey

We have optimized this view of of the SurveyGizmo survey building tool for mobile browsers. When you’re out of the office you can still get realtime updates on your surveys. Grab your phone and try it out now!

Fun Fridays: The “Stuff We Like” Edition

Samantha Lynn Harms — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 21:32:04 +0000

Congratulations! You’ve made it to Friday. To celebrate this international weekly accomplishment, we’re hereby instating Fun Fridays, where we post items that aim to increase your end-of-the-week jollification. Yay!

As fun is a relative term, we’ll try to vary the types of posts we do, to make sure there’s fun for everyone! On that note, if you have suggestions about what we should write about, you can pop over to this survey and let us know your ideas. This first post is of the Stuff We Like variety, which is for products or services that SurveyGizmo employees find fun and useful.

Today, we’ll be highlighting TextExpander by SmileOnMyMac.

And we’ll tell you what: we really love TextExpander.

In short, TextExpander saves us hours of typing. The software allows us to assign shortcuts to text that is written frequently, such as a long signature, frequently typed URLs, and frequently used CSS and HTML. So, instead of typing the whole signature, or copying and pasting it from a text file, I just type “SIG”, and TextExpander fills it in for me. This time-saving product increases efficiency, thus increasing our happy-vibes.

Just check out my usage stats:

9.72 hours is more than a regular workday! And I haven’t used it for a month yet. Stats like these are the reason we love TextExpander so much!

Two Tips for Successful Snippets:

Modify the case of your shortcuts to reduce conflict with commonly typed words. So, instead of sig, which would interfere with the word signature, I make it SIG.
Use commas or periods at the beginning of your snippets–this reduces most conflicts!

More Cool Features:

TextExpander syncs with MobileMe.
You can create snippets from selections, or from text copied into your clipboard.
Text’s not all: it supports Rich Text, including photos and formatted text, Shell Scripts, and AppleScripts.
There’s TextExpander for iPhone and iPod touch, goodie! You can download that here.
For iPhone and iPod touch app integrates with cool apps like Tweetie and WriteRoom. See the full list of mobile apps that integrate here.
They have pre-created HTML and CSS snippet groups for your coding convenience.

You can download a free trial of TextExpander, and buy the full version for a measley $29.95. TextExpander pays for itself when time equals money!

C|NET Mentions SurveyGizmo’s iPoll for the iPhone

Scott McDaniel — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 15:53:59 +0000

Update: As of 2011, we no longer offer the iPoll.SurveyGizmo.com application.

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 saw a nice spike in traffic the other day when CNET covered iPoll in their iPhone Apps section. This was a nice surprise, because we hadn’t seen iPoll covered since we released it back in July during the debut of the iPhone. iPoll is our free, quick polling service. You can ask your friends where to go to dinner, take a vote during a meeting, or even ask the world their opinion on a question.

Oh and don’t forget you don’t even need an iPhone! You can use iPoll with any web browser and a wide variety of web enabled phones. Give iPoll a try.

SurveyGizmo Surveys on the Blackberry: Who knew!?

Christian Vanek — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 15:35:17 +0000

We discovered something totally unexpected this morning while doing a log check. Apparently our efforts towards accessible surveys had an unintended (and beneficial) effect — survey takers are using their Blackberry web browsers to take surveys created in SurveyGizmo! Who knew!

Not being a Blackberry person myself, I didn’t even know this was possible. We have known for months that a growing number of people are using mobile devices (like Treos) to take surveys. But until now, we didn’t even know the Blackberry had a web browser (blush).

We will post more information about how well the surveys work (and look) on the Blackberry as soon as we test them ourselves.

If you have one, try one of your surveys and see how well they work! Post a comment about your experience and any tips we can use to make sure surveys work well on this platform.

As always, we look forward to your feedback!

Update: 9/17/2007

Just a quick update. Having struggled with the cellular carriers to get my number ported I was forced to get a whole new phone (long story). The good news is that I am now a proud owner of a Blackberry 8830! I can confirm that, yes, our surveys work and look darn good on an Blackberry device. I suspect this is largely due to all the accessibility work we have done.

Social Networking comes to iPoll

Scott McDaniel — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 17:23:09 +0000

Update: As of 2011, we no longer offer the iPoll.SurveyGizmo.com application.

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.

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!

10 Tips for Developing iPhone Applications

Scott McDaniel — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 13:24:28 +0000

Update: As of 2011, we no longer offer the iPoll.SurveyGizmo.com application.

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.

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.

#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
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

Scott McDaniel — Wed, 04 Jul 2007 16:51:48 +0000

Update: As of 2011, we no longer offer the iPoll.SurveyGizmo.com application.

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.

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

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

Happy Polling!