Productivity Portfolio

If you think about all the decisions you make, many involve information from others. Even while doing the research for this article, we ran into three situations with colleagues where an online survey would work better.

In each scenario, paper or email was used and someone had to manage collecting and evaluating the responses. I pity the person who tries to read my handwriting.

Zoomerang offers a different approach where you can create a free online survey up to 30 questions. The disclaimer is the free version does not offer all the features of the paid service. We can't argue with that business model since we do the same thing. All the same, we found the basic membership service very helpful for small surveys.

The first step is designing your survey. Although you can just jump in and use one of the Zoomerang templates, you should think about the survey's purpose and questions. The company's website provides helpful information in their knowledgebase. You can search for the phrase "best practices" and see a listing of tips.

For our first survey, we chose to use one of the "concept test" templates. The template contains a series of questions and a design theme. On the right side of each question, are buttons that allow you to edit the question, add a question or delete it. On the left side are controls for changing the question order.

At first, you'll probably be editing the text to suit your needs. The editing process also allows you to change the question data type. These data types range from section headings to multiple-choice questions. The listing is comprehensive, but one missing feature of the free service is branching or skip logic. In other words, I couldn't have a participant skip a series of questions based on a previous answer.

After you've edited your questions, there are two more steps to consider design themes and testing. Zoomerang allows you to select from many themes, which mostly differ in color. The next step is to preview the survey to see how your survey looks and operates. Our suggestion is to also preview with different browsers. Once you activate and launch the survey, you can't make changes although you could use the existing survey as the basis for a new one.

The next step is deciding who should receive the survey. The service allows you to create an address book or list, which helps if you plan to survey the same people. In our case, we copied the URL for our survey and sent email invitations using Microsoft Outlook.

One nice feature of the Zoomerang service was we could log into our account, click on my surveys, and see the results in real-time. In the example below, you can see that 21 people had already finished the survey.

If I click View Results for my active Concept Test survey, I can see the aggregated information for each question. The information is nicely displayed with a bar chart and statistical values.

For open-ended questions, I can click the view button and see the responses. In the example below, I had an open-ended question with five lines for the answer.

We did experience some quirkiness with editing questions. Occasionally, we would get a java script error "Answer Options must have at least one non-space character", but we quickly found a solution in the support knowledgebase. It seems I added an extra space. The other item was sometimes I would close the browser without logging out. When I returned to the site, I would see a message saying that I hadn't logged out and remind me that free basic membership is a single user application.

The service appears robust and even allows simple html in the questions such as italics, bold and so on. The biggest drawbacks are that you must view the results online within 10 days. You're also restricted to viewing 100 responses per survey. Unlike the paid service, you can't download your results or do cross tabulations.

After creating a couple of surveys and watching the results, we're quite pleased with the service. We even asked our participants to let us know if they experienced any issues. This was a key factor for us as on several occasions, we've run into display problems with surveys from competing services.

While Zoomerang isn't the only company offering online survey services, we found the range of services and ease of use worked for us. And for those times where we might need to have a large or complex survey, Zoomerang offers their professional service for a monthly or yearly fee.

Zoomerang Account Features Comparison