Recipe 5. Survey Builder

Surveys aren't just for gauging the political winds. Companies use surveys all the time to test the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns or to evaluate interest in a potential product. Surveys are valuable tools within an intranet or workgroup as well, whether they are intended to determine the direction on a policy option or uncover underlying reactions to a design approach.

There is no one fixed format for a survey; in fact, many surveys mix and match a variety of question formats. The most common survey formats include options for choosing one response from a number of possibilities, such as with a radio button group or a series of checkboxes. A survey builder application must be able to incorporate as many formats as possible, in whatever configuration desired.

The Survey Builder application, described in this chapter, meets that requirement and more. Survey Builder starts by giving you the capabilities to create new surveys and, separately, add questions to them. The Survey Manager page displays an overview of the available surveys, including when they are scheduled to be available and what their current status is live or offline. Existing surveys and their questions and responses are, of course, editable. The actual survey page, presented to the survey taker, is assembled dynamically and the results stored for later analysis. One of the most useful aspects of the Survey Builder application is the statistics page, which allows you to see the current results at a glance, broken down by percentages.