SurveyShare Blog

We’ve been steadily working on improving SurveyShare over the past few months. One improvement we’d like to feature today is an improvement to our skip logic. This is also known as question logic or skip patterns.

You can now display or not display an entire page worth of questions based on a respondents answers. This is in addition to the already existing ability to skip ahead based on a respondents answers.

This feature has many uses. You could display a list of questions to those who responded 30 or younger to a question about their age. You decide not to display a set of questions that do not apply to a respondent. You could display instructions to a respondent that has requested instructions on a previous page.

We think the SurveyShare skip logic offers the most powerful ability customize what your respondents see and do not see. Many of you asked for this specific feature or posed questions to us that this feature solves. We’re hear you and we’re happy to release this.

If you have any questions about SurveyShare or the abilities of our skip logic, please feel free to contact us at support@surveyshare.com or toll-free at 888-406-4496.

SurveyShare is proud to announce that we now have native Excel support instead of using the Excel XML standard. We’ve been working on this change for some time. We performed thorough testing to ensure this works with surveys and responses in other languages and surveys that have large response sets (10,000+).

What does this mean for you? Excel downloads will be smaller in size. In addition, the Excel files will work better with Excel itself and other programs that support Excel files. For larger files, this means a faster download time. For most people the change will not be noticeable, however we are still very proud to make this improvement now and going forward.

As always, we continue to make improvements. If you have any suggestions or comments, please email support@surveyshare.com!

When designing a survey, accessibility is of the highest importance. Particularly if you’re addressing a wide audience, it’s important that your survey is easy to access, easy to understand and easy to answer. Here are our top 10 tips in creating accessible surveys with SurveyShare:

1. Use semi-dark colored fonts on light-colored backgrounds for maximum readability. Avoid very bright or intense colors (even including black on white).
2. Avoid red-like text on green, or vice versa. Readers may be colorblind!
3. Select a simple background that doesn’t distract from the main focus – the questions.
4. Whenever possible, keep the response options the same. This is least confusing, and most visually appealing as well.
5. Be consistent in the way the questions are worded.
6. Keep questions simply worded, without extraneous explanation or distraction.
7. Use vocabulary that will be well understood by your audience. Unknown words may distract attention away from your survey.
8. Use skip logic to appropriately route respondents.
9. Group similar questions together on the same page.
10. Use images, videos or links only when they are crucial to the understanding of the question.

We hope this helps! What helpful accessibility tips have you learned along the way? Let us know at tips@surveyshare.com. We’d like to hear from you!

Did you know that SurveyShare’s on Twitter?

Follow us on Twitter and keep in touch! Ask us questions, suggest feature updates, or just tell us how your survey is going – we love to hear from our fans!

We’re also on Facebook! From time to time we offer special discounts to our Facebook fans. Like SurveyShare? Like us on Facebook and make it official!

See you there!

Want a free Pro Unlimited account for a year? Tweet @SurveyShare with the tag #surveysharefreepro and tell us why! 3 winners will be selected for free accounts!

Did you know that SurveyShare has over 200 survey templates already prepared? From general templates, like 360 Degree Feedback and Conference Evaluation to more specialized templates like Employee Health Benefits Satisfaction and Campus Safety, pre-built surveys make your job much easier.

It’s easy! When you’re creating a new survey, just select “Create from Template”. Select the relevant template category, and find the template that best suits your needs. Then, edit the survey template to customize to satisfaction.

Pre-made template categories include:

Academic Templates

• Distance Learning
• Higher Ed
• K – 12

Business Templates

• Customer
• Employee/HR
• Not For Profit
• Training

Medical Templates

• General
• Patient
• Physician

Government & Other Templates

• General
• Golf
• Government

Need to make a new template? No problem! You can also create a new survey from one of your previous surveys.

Finally, enterprise members can create survey templates and make them available to all members of the same institution. Have a specialized research survey that many different people will be sending out at different times? An enterprise account may be just right for you. Contact us to discuss enterprise options. We look forward to hearing from you!

One of the ways we make surveys easy at SurveyShare is quick integration with Facebook and Twitter. Within SurveyShare, you can easily tweet your survey or post a link to your survey to your news feed which will be seen by all your followers and friends.

This feature is available within the publish section for your survey. When you’re looking at the “My Surveys” page, click on “publish” for the given survey. You’ll find the link to tweet your survey and share on Facebook at the bottom right. If you have not yet tweeted a survey or shared on Facebook, then we’ll need to ask you to verify SurveyShare. Otherwise, sharing your survey is a quick message and a click of a button.

Tweeting your survey to your Twitter account allows you to easily collect feedback from all your followers. Find out what your followers are thinking. Are you doing a great job? Are your tweets relevant? Is there feedback or comments that twitter users would be willing to share but in an anonymous way?

Posting your survey to Facebook is a way to quickly collect feedback from your friends. You can use surveys to help with scheduling for a party or ad hoc sporting event. You can anonymously collect feedback from your friends to help crowd source import decisions within your peer group, or just collect research data for a project or class. Your peers know you best.

Response rates tend to be higher when you ask your peers for feedback versus the general public. With Facebook and Twitter, you have an existing relationship with those that know you best. Get valuable feedback quickly and easily. As always, if you have any questions, feel free to give us a shout! Call our toll-free number 888-406-4496 from 10-6pm EST or e-mail us 24/7 at support@surveyshare.com.

Hi everyone! Today we’ve got a new feature on SurveyShare to show off – we’ve added a new question type. Now you can embed YouTube videos in your survey – just select the YouTube question type, enter in the link, and your survey will be embedded.

For instance, while respondents are working on the survey, you can have them view a YouTube video, and answer questions about it. Of course, we have our own ideas for what a great YouTube question looks like:

How do you survey a broad audience, while asking questions relevant to more specific groups within? When designing a successful survey, excellent response rates depend on asking fewer well-targeted questions.  Our skip logic tool is a powerful tool that can help you better tailor your survey towards its intended audience.

Skip logic allows you to send users to different pages of the survey – skipping over irrelevant parts of the survey – based on earlier responses. By designing pages intended for specific types of people, you can really tailor custom-tailor a survey quite a bit.

Here’s an example: suppose you’re running a survey analyzing the work habits of college and university students at all levels. While you’d ask an undergraduate student how much time they spend at a job (distinguishing this from schoolwork), you may want to specifically ask a graduate student how much time he or she spends on TA duties. The purpose here is threefold:

• By asking more appropriate questions,  you better connect with your intended audience
• By using more relevant language, you can illicit more accurate responses
• If some questions are entirely irrelevant to some people, you can allow these people to completely skip the question, encouraging a higher survey completion rate.

To use skip logic, first create pages for each set of questions you’d like to ask. A page should be a grouping of questions all specific to one targeted audience. Then, for the question for which a response determines the next question that should be asked, click on Add Skip Logic.

From here, you’ll see options to direct users to the next relevant page.

Skip Logic is also helpful for ensuring that your audience is indeed the target audience. For instance, if you’d like all your responses to be from female graduate students aged 24-26, you can ask about age, gender and occupation right on the first page. Using Skip Logic, if any of the answers fall outside these ranges, you can gently direct the respondent to the end of the survey, and thank them for their time. Then, pat yourself on the back for saving yourself the time of weeding out those non-relevant responses.

Have you creatively used Skip Logic to better reach your intended audience? Share your ideas with us on Twitter: @SurveyShare. We look forward to hearing from you!