Three tools for online surveys

Polldaddy

Polldaddy is the pseudonym of a commercial cloud service from California-based Automattic Inc. [8], which also develops products such as WordPress.com, Akismet, and Gravatar. Like the other Automattic services, Polldaddy features single sign-on access. I used my existing WordPress.com account and linked this to the survey platform.

A package for installing on your own server does not exist, and all the data remains in the cloud. For your own WordPress blog, you can also use the Polldaddy Polls & Ratings plugin [9], which is easily set up with just a few mouse clicks and integrates the Polldaddy service via the WordPress Dashboard.

Users have a choice of three pricing models. The free account in particular lacks an export function – a deal-breaker for anyone who wants to perform statistical analysis of the results. The Pro version costs US$  200 per year (or US$  30 per month); in addition to exports, it offers superior filters for responses, customized links to the survey, and the possibility of changing the CSS code. With the corporate account for just under US$  900 a year (US$  100 per month), up to 10 employees have access to the surveys that are available under your own domain name.

After logging in to Polldaddy, users click the icon with the gear wheel or the avatar to edit their profiles and set the language for the web interface. Polldaddy offers Surveys, Polls, Quizzes, and Ratings (Figure 7). In voting, participants answer a single question, whereas quizzes test participants' knowledge and evaluate the responses, and the ratings option lets participants give a thumbs up or down or assign between one and five stars.

Figure 7: Polldaddy offers several survey types and does not bunch everything into a single category. Users can easily create and review quizzes.

If you choose a survey, you first need to set up the name, the permalink, and a welcome message for the participants. A separate final message is reserved for payment options. Farther down the page, you can configure when a survey is considered completed and whether there should be feedback via computer. Next to that, users of the paid version can define a password or captcha protection and limit participation to IP or email addresses.

The Question Editor tab takes you to the questions. On the left are the different types, which you can drag and drop or click to add them to the list (Figure 8). The selection leaves no wishes unfulfilled. Polldaddy offers, among other things free-text responses, matrix questions, multiple-choice, and sorting tasks. Clicking on an entry opens the preferences. You can use them to convert multiple selections into single selections by reducing the number of response options in the drop-down menu to the right – this functionality, however, is handled better by LimeSurvey and Opina.

Figure 8: Clear and versatile – Polldaddy.

Well Organized

The matrix question option is very convenient. Users can enter questions and answers directly next to one another in an interface, rather than defining separate entry forms. Polldaddy also offers to display the individual elements of the matrix questions in random combinations at each iteration of the survey. To do so, the tool changes the order of the questions only, the answers only, or both. Moreover, you can set up branches. Like the conditions option in LimeSurvey, branches let you guide the participants based on their responses.

Multimedia elements are possible with some restrictions. You can integrate movies with links to external sources; images (JPEG, PNG, and GIF) and MP3 files are uploaded directly. These media are also optionally available in other surveys, provided you check the appropriate box when uploading. The Media Library tab in the same dialog provides access your uploaded images and MP3s.

Question groups like those in LimeSurvey do not exist. Polldaddy displays buttons at the top of a survey that let you add, copy, and delete pages. The options for changing the order of the questions are not as intuitive, and it is not possible to move an item to a different page. If you don't pay attention, it takes a lot of patience and quite a few mouse clicks to move everything to the right place.

The Survey Style tab lets you assign your Polldaddy survey a particular look. Sixteen prebuilt themes are available for all account types, and a preview shows what the finished presentation looks like (Figure 9). If you have a commercial account, you can also customize the layout and directly edit the CSS code. In the free version, you can select from 18 different fonts.

Figure 9: Polldaddy wins the design competition, offering prebuilt themes for every taste. Editing the CSS source code is an option for commercial customers only.

No Privacy

At the top right, below Collect Responses, you will find functions for distributing the survey. Here you will find the link to publish your survey on Facebook or Twitter. Polldaddy even generates QR codes in five different sizes. This tool manages email lists of participants and sends out invitations. The software also offers prebuilt source code for embedding the survey in a web page or as an inline popup. WordPress users will want to use the short code.

As a cloud service, although hosted on servers in the United States, Polldaddy may not be the best choice when surveying sensitive data. Anonymity is not guaranteed, and the user cannot check whether the provider evaluates the data. Additionally, the IP addresses of the participants appear in the results.

The View Results tab takes you to the graphical analysis and the export options. The former can be downloaded as a PDF document. This function is hidden in the unintuitively named Export CSV menu item.

Polldaddy draws bar graphs for the results of multiple-choice questions and colored tables for matrix questions and displays the complete responses for essay questions. When you export data, you can choose between CSV, XML, or Excel files. Alternatively, Polldaddy is the only test candidate to send the results directly to Google Docs and create a new spreadsheet. Unlike LimeSurvey and Opina, Polldaddy does not generate SPSS files.

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