Hi

Happy New Year!  Welcome to the first of what will become regular QuestMetrics news letters.  These newsletters will keep you informed of developments within QuestMetrics, sepecifically in relation to QuestDesigner and QuestServer, as well as providing tips and advice on how to get the most from our products.

We have a lot planned for 2010 and we want to know which developments are of interest to you.  We want to know when we are doing something right and we also want to know when we are missing the mark so that we can fix it. So please stay in touch with us and let us know what you are thinking.

Keep your eyes out for the first of our new series of short, instructional YouTube videos.  We'll be adding to these over time so that we have a library of short, easy to digest tips and advice for QuestDesigner and QuestServer.  Remember also, that if you have some specific functional requirement for QuestDesigner or QuestServer that is not already provided, please let us know and we'll see and we'll see what we can do to help.

QuestDesigner

There will be one more release of the current version of QuestDesigner due out in March, which will essentially be a maintenance release to address a couple of minor issues.  After this, we are commencing on a complete rebuild of QuestDesigner,  so now is the time to let us know your wish list - the things that you want to see available in the product.  We also want to know which bits really work for you so we don't break them!

Tips, tricks and suggestions  for QuestDesigner

Getting your head around Groups

Groups are the chameleon of the QuestDesigner elements, having the ability to change function merely by altering their properties. Depending on how you set the properties, they can work in one of four ways.

Most often, Groups are used as a building block for creating Compound Questions such as Single Punch and Multi Punch grids. To do this, ensure that all the child elements of the group contain the same list type, the grouping on the group is set to All and the orientation is set to Vertical.

Next, they are used to group child question elements together so that they are displayed on one page.  This is acheived by seetting the Grouping function to All and the orientation to Vertical. Remeber that the effect of this will differ depending on how you are deploying the survey.  On QuestServer, the result will be as suggested - everything is displayed on a single web page. If you are deploying to paper however, you can only fit what you can fit onto a physical piece of paper, so you may get some spill over to the next page (or beyond) if you have a lot of content contained in the elements of the group.

Groups are also used to construct Mixed Content questions.  An example of a Mixed Content Question would be the situation where you want a respondent to answer a single punch question and a memo type question as part of the answer to a single question.  You could marke the single punch question as Allow Comment, however, if you are expecting your respondents to enter a significant amount of text as their response then the comment option is probably not sufficient.  If you put the Single Punch question and the Memo in a group, set the grouping option to All and the Orientation to Horizontal, this will display the two questions adjacent to each other, rather than one after the other vertically, and visually helps bind the two questions together.  You get 2 distinct answers in your response data set, and all the text elements of the group and each question are available to be used in your output.

Finally, when you set the Grouping property to "None", Groups perform similarly to Sections, where they are used to sub divide a questionnaire into logical sub sections, but have no impact on layout.
 

QuestServer

As you are no doubt aware, the new version of QuestServer is something that we have been promising for quite some time now.  We are in a position to commence some limited beta testing of the new server, and would encourage you to put your hand up if you want to be first with hands on our new web platform.  We are very excited by the capabilities of our new server, (we should be, we've been working on it for long enough :)  ). The entire system has been rebuilt from scrath and some of the facilites that the new server will provide are:

• The ability to simultaneously host multi lingual questionnaires
• Multiple entry options
• Question output templating that extends to the question level (and has no impact on anyone else's templates so that you can have the layout that suits you)
• Enhanced feedback and performance from the scripting engine.
• More capable Panel Management system.
• Each survey slot comes with it's own dedicated testing slot so you can make sure that your uploaded questionnaire is right before switching it over to the live version.
• Native SPSS export as well as the existing text and CSV formats

In the meantime, for the current version of QuestServer, we are pleased to announce the imminent death of the dreaded settings.conf file. We have a new  settings editor about to be released which will mean you can adjust your questionnaire settings on the web itself without having to download and edit the settings file.  Stay tuned, more on this very very soon.

Tips, tricks and suggestions  for QuestServer

Over the years, we have added options to QuestServer where they solved problems for particular clients.

One of these is the ability to redirect users back to your own site once they have completed answering the questionnaire.  When this is enabled, respondents completing a questionnaire will no longer see the default exit page. Instead, their browser is redirected to the web site specified in the settings file.

In it's simplest form, it is configured thus:

CompleteSurveyExitURL=www.questmetrics.com

where www.questmetrics.com should be replaced with your web site address

You can also include parameters in the url where the value is sourced from the respondent's answers if you want to.  If you wanted to include the the answer to question id BD6 in the url, this is what is required:

CompleteSurveyExitURL=www.questmetrics.com?myparam=%s
CompleteSurveyExitParam=BD6

In the above example, the system replaces the '%s' characters with the value returned from question BD6 for that respondent. Obviously, you can only use questions that have a single response for this - a multipunch quesiton won't work.
 

All the best for now,
Stuart McKenzie