14 DAY TRIAL // If you need an Internet survey, you can probably order one, if you don't have the necessary programing and statistical knowledge to elaborate and interpret something like this. If you need a survey on a regular basis, then things can get complicated, and you might be on the lookout for another solution. One thing you can do is learn how to make and interpret a survey yourself, but that takes time and practice, something which you might not afford, especially if you have no previous scripting and statistics knowledge. Enter Pronto Survey, a program designed to do all the legwork of making a survey for you. While you would still have to have some knowledge of surveys, it does not need to be in-depth, merely for you to have a clear idea of what you want to accomplish through the survey.
The Pronto Survey package contains two applications: Pronto Survey and Pronto Survey Analyzer. We shall treat them both.
So what exactly does Pronto Survey do? This application will help you in creating a survey, from the layout to the PHP scripting, everything is handled by this application. To create a survey, you work with two things, pages and questions. After the survey has been laid out, all you need to do is set a few extra scripting and database related parameters and you can export a fully functional version with just the click of a button.
Despite web pages being able to stretch forever, making it possible to fit all your questions on one page, there are several disadvantages to doing so. Firstly, if you have a large number of questions, respondents might lose motivation to participate if they see a long line of questions. It makes the survey look like it would take more time to complete than it really does. Another disadvantage is that if you only have one page you cannot work with rules, which are a very powerful statistical tool.
Rules allow you to change the course of the survey, by presenting the pages in a different order, depending on how the questions were answered so far. This allows you to skip unnecessary questions, or those which do not apply, or present new questions in order to better detail an area of interest. Examples of this range from having questions that only apply to men skipped by female participants or presenting ten additional questions linked to music preferences if a participant chose music as one of five possible interests.
Rules are a incredibly powerful tool, letting you run a short pretest in order to identify which general group the respondent belongs to, present them special questions that further serve to narrow down their preferences and then present them with those core questions that interest you and are relevant to that respondent's group and subgroup.
Questions can take just about any form they traditionally take on paper, except for images, which is a curious omission. The possible question types are: open, in which the respondent writes down the answer using his own words; simple, in which there are multiple answers but only one may be chosen; multiple selection, which like the name implies, offers many answers of which more than one can be chosen at the same time; and a evaluation question, which is a matrix that can be of any size you want, but only one choice per row.
Results After you have set up a survey, and people have already participated in it, answers will start piling up, and the MYSQL database is not very likely to be much help to you unless you know how to work with it.
Fortunately, Pronto Survey Analyzer is made to deal exactly with these specific tasks. All you have to do is point in the direction of the database and it will start taking all that information and present you with three options: Update, which will update the local information to make it match the data from the database server (the information is never removed from the server by this option); delete, which lets you remove any previously downloaded survey data so you can redownload everything; lastly, you can see the survey statistics such as how many people have participated, and the date and time for the latest results, among many others.
After you have downloaded the results you can view them and work with them locally, without ever touching the information in the database. The results are shown in a manner similar to that when you create the survey, by page and by question. There are several ways in which the information can be displayed, beside the raw numbers, Pronto Survey Analyzer being able to generate bar, line, and pie charts on the fly.
One of the great things you can do here is group 'other' answers, the kind where respondents enter their own answer in the text field, into groups so that the same answer, even if worded differently, can be worked with as a group. Also, for those who need a fine degree of control and comparison, you can filter certain results and cross-tabulate questions.
The Good Build complex surveys without a iota of PHP or SQL, and see the results presented in a visual manner without having to add two numbers. Easy to use and very well documented.
The Bad The Applications themselves are not the pinnacle of stability, and the templates that came bundled with the software I was not able to open no matter how hard I tried. Apparently, the version of the program I was using was too old to be able to work with them. Absurd.
The Truth A great way to get all you can out of surveys without having to go into dirty details. It has no server hosting restrictions like other similar products do and it is very easy to use and well documented. Great stuff.
Here are some screenshots, click to enlarge:
