Survey - User Interface

A package for OpenACS 4.6

User Interface

Taking a survey

The taking of a survey is quite straightforward. Once the user has selected a survey, he is presented the questions of the first section. After he has answered them, they are tested, if they are ok (e.g. no text answers to number questions) and complete, that is, he did not omit any questions that were marked as required (with a red star).

If there is a mistake, there is little page telling so and the user needs to reanswer the questions. If they were alright, the next section is displayed. If there are branches, this section can depend on the choices, the user made. If there are no further sections the survey is finished and the user is thanked.

In a multisectioned survey, there can be a little status bar in the top of the survey, indicating the progress towards completion.

If the user leaves the surve before completing it, the survey is marked as unfinished and the next time he starts this survey he can continue just where he left. This option is of course not available if the user is not logged in and responding to a public survey.

If it is possible to edit the responses one has given in a survey, the prior responses are listed to the user, when he chooses a survey to take so he can choose to edit one of them. In that case, the answers he gave that time are already filled in.

Processing the results of a survey

There are several ways to process the results of a survey which are accessible from the administration of the survey. If you choose to view the results by user you are presented a list of users who have taken the survey. Selecting a user gives you his responses to the survey in detail.

Summary gives a summarized view of the results. Multiple choice questions are added up by response, showing the distribution of answers. To get more information, there are special drill-down pages to access the answers to all questions along with the users that gave these answers.

For more thorough examination it is possible to export the answers in .csv (Comma Separated Values) format. These data can easily be exported into other applications for further processing (for example into Excel). You have the option to download only the responses of registered users or all responses including not logged-in users.