That being said…we’ve got new survey integrations to tell you about!

First off, there’s our new GoDaddy integration. If you need a private branded domain for your survey, you can now easily register it right from the SurveyGizmo dashboard. It’s simple to get to:

1. From the Publish tab, click on “Default Link” under the My Links and Campaigns menu.

2. Under “Sub-Type,” click on either “Branded Subdomain” or Private Domain.”

3. Click on “Account Settings.

4. Under “Private Domain,” follow the instructions to set up a GoDaddy domain from within the menu.

Once your domain is set up, we’ll incorporate it into your online survey automatically. No more messing with CNAME’s or DNS – it’s all taken care of. For those of you with Enterprise plans, this should make it much easier to whitelabel your surveys and promote your brand using private domains.

Secondly, we’ve integrated with WhatUsersDo. For those of you who don’t know, WhatUsersDo provides on-demand usability testing and user experience research for websites of all shapes and sizes. But websites aren’t the only thing that needs testing – web surveys deserve testing, too (we always recommend testing your survey using our “Send a Test Link” feature). Now, for a small fee, you can get a ton of insight into how independent users view your survey.

Here’s how it works: when publishing a survey, click on the link marked “Send a Test Link.” Normally you would use this feature to send a test survey out to up to 5 different survey respondents whom you specify. Now, however, you’ll notice that there’s another option – simply click on the link to WhatUsersDo, and you can immediately get feedback from random survey respondents around the world.

You can specify different objectives for the users you test, and ask them specific questions as the survey ends. They’ll also provide a video (with audio) of the user moving through the tasks you’ve assigned them, so you can really get the feel for how they’re interacting with your survey, and where they’re confused or running into problems.

Obviously, it’s a great way to step away from your survey and get a feel for how an unbiased user will react. You might learn that a page is too overwhelming, for instance, and decide to go back and break it up into smaller, more digestible pieces.

Both of these new integrations are just a few of the integrations we offer with our partners – from email to CRM, you can find a ton of resources to enhance and extend your surveys.

Happy surveying!

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!

And if you’ve been reading up on some of the Dev Lab projects we’ve spotlighted so far, you can see that they’ve risen to the challenge.

Today we’re going to focus on a couple more exciting new question types developed by our staff.

Mobile Question Types

Remember Matt Null, whose geolocation survey questions we told you about earlier? He’s got another project he’s working on, too: Matt decided to take some of our most popular custom question types and optimize them for mobile devices.

Now, keep in mind that we offer Mobile Survey Themes that detect and display a mobile-optimized theme for mobile users…but sometimes you don’t need to go to that length. Sometimes it’s all about just replacing one or two of your custom question types with a new one that’s better-suited for mobile devices.

And that’s what Matt’s going after. So far, he’s created mobile-optimized versions of two survey question types – the slider question type and a toggle question – that are optimized to run more smoothly for mobile users.

And this is just the beginning. He’s planning a suite of mobile question types, so your mobile users can have access to all the question types that work really well on desktops, but not as smoothly on mobile devices.

Signature Box

Meanwhile, Seth McClaine has been hard at work on his own project: a signature box survey question.

Using Seth’s question type, you’ll be able to request signature confirmation from your survey respondents. It works using HTML5 to capture mouse movements, so anyone can use it. Users can also draw lines, shapes, etc, depending on what you require in your survey. All they need is a mouse (they can also use a pen tablet, or even a mobile device like a phone or an iPad).

We think the signature box will have a wide range of uses, particularly for things like job applications and legal forms (Seth originally got the idea when he was signing a lease on a house – why not put it online and save a stack of paper?). And given that it works so well with mobile devices, it will be an ideal solution for in-person surveys and market research using an iPad or other tablet. We’re looking forward to seeing what you all do with it!

Both of these new question types will be available in the near future – we’ll keep you posted!

Last week we told you about Matt’s Google Maps survey tools, which allow you to embed maps and geolocation-related survey questions and reporting into your surveys. Today, let’s talk about video.

Not one, but two of our developers are working on video-related survey tools during Dev Week 2011. Ranging from video embeds to webcam support, we’re about to have a ton that you can do with video and images.

Webcam Capture

Ryan Hadley, a SurveyGizmo SysAdmin, is working on a video capture survey question type. Using the webcam of your survey-taker’s computer, it allows you to capture still images of people responding to your survey.

The video capture tool works using Flash, since HTML5 does not yet have the ability to call and pull data from a remote webcam. It’s got a simple, easy-to-use interface that allows respondents to see the picture they’ve just taken before submitting it.

We see a lot of interesting (& fun!) uses for this tool – one obvious use is identity verification of the person taking the survey. For job application surveys or similar survey types, it will allow you to attach a face to a name. Or how about a customer service survey – “Show us the face you made after your support call!”

Youtube Video Surveys

Meanwhile, Anthony Hildoer, one of our Sr. PHP Developers, is working on a tool that lets you embed Youtube videos in your surveys.

Except it’s a little bit more than that.

In addition to simply embedding a video, Anthony has made this question type into an interactive experience. You can set start and end parameters, and get feedback on a video clip, in a few different forms:

• Click the spots on the video that stand out
• Add comments to different sections of the video
• Thumbs up/thumbs down responses at different times
• …and more.

Reporting actually winds up being the real challenge with this survey question type, because there’s a ton of data to combine and analyze. The reporting Anthony’s working on will allow users to analyze survey-taker’s feedback based on time, image, and more. If you add a video question to your survey, you’ll be able to tell which points in the video are the most well-received, which are dull, and even get feedback in your survey-takers’ own words regarding the points when they clicked.

Obviously, this question type will allow you to do a huge amount with video in your surveys, ranging from simply displaying a disclaimer video to requesting specific feedback on a video clip.

Awesome! So When Will They Be Released?

We’re looking forward to having these out in the near future. Stay tuned to the SurveyGizmo website and blog for more details.

Today we want to dig in a little more with one of our most popular new custom question types: the slider survey question.

What is a Slider Survey Question?

Slider survey question types are usually used for questions whose answers are on a scale (such as, “On a scale of 1 to 10, how do you rate SurveyGizmo’s Survey Tools?” or “How much do you agree with the following statement?”). They offer a different, more usable take on the traditional range question type (in fact, there’s one key difference between a slider question type and a range question type: the slider has an indicated starting point. Users can either choose to keep the initial starting point, or drag the slider to agree with their preferences).

By offering the ability to slide a bar on a visual line, researchers can improve the usability of their surveys, and also receive much more nuanced responses from survey takers.

What do you use them for?

You can use slider survey questions for any number of purposes. Here are a few example survey questions:

• How often do you bike to work?
• What percent of your income do you give to charity?
• How much do you agree with the following statement?
• Where do you fall on the U.S. political spectrum (left, right, in-between)?

As you can see, any time you’re looking to measure the degree of something, a slider may be the right question type for you.

How do I set them up?

If you already have access to the 5-Pack of Custom Survey Questions, you should find them in your account the next time you create a survey.

When setting up your slider questions, there are a number of different options – you can add different units, labels, and even tell the system where you want the slider to start.

What else can I do with sliders?

Our slider survey question type is extremely flexible, giving you the ability to customize it like crazy.

You can use CSS to change the graphics on the slider, doing things like:

• Changing the color of the slider
• Adding a gradient to the overall slider feel
• Changing the slider “handle” from a bar to an image

Need more customization? Our Professional Services team can help you get even more out of slider questions, providing customizations like:

• Vertical sliders
• Adding unique units to your sliders (instead of numeric values)
• Multiple sliders that sum up to 100 automatically (for percentage-based questions)

Let our Pro Services Team know what you’re looking for, and we can make it happen.

We’re excited to have added sliders to our feature list as a custom question type. We hope you get a lot of use out of them!

Don’t have the new question types yet? Check out the Summer 5-Pack Promo before July 5th for access to sliders, card sort, and 3 other new question types!