Keep in mind that this roadmap is not set in stone: we wish you to become an active part of it. Please leave a comment at the end of this post or send us an email with your suggestions.

Although we can’t promise to implement everything, we absolutely guarantee that all suggestions will be taken into consideration.

Hide page and question numbers

This is probably the feature mostly asked about and we’ll not let you down. An option will be added to turn off automatic page and question numbering, allowing you to use the numbering system that best fits your survey.

Question types

Our first intention was to start with a small set of questions and then to broaden the choice based on our users’ feedback.

We’ll add more question types in the future, and we also think that there’s a lot of room to innovate here… You can expect a lot of improvements in the long run.

Revamped Analyze section

Our users are constantly telling us how satisfied they are with the analyze interface, but we really think we can make it a lot better.

How? Better graphs and export options are only two of the many things we plan to do.

Improve the printing options

There are still some issues with the print versions of Survs’s surveys. We’ll be tweaking that in the short term until we (and you) are fully satisfied with the solution.

Pricing

We have listened to your suggestions and we’re working on a new pricing scheme for Survs. Soon we’ll tell you all about that.

Survs’s API

We’re all about open systems, so a Survs’s API will come sooner or later. However, there are some priorities over that, so we don’t expect to release it this year.

Here are some ideas we already have in mind:

• Authentication on other systems
• Widgets
• Extracting data from your surveys’ responses
• Importing and exporting surveys from and to other survey applications
• Integration of your contact lists into the email invite channels

Themes and survey templates

There’s a lot of innovation waiting for you! For the beginners amongst you, we’re going to start publishing some survey templates for you to use. After that, we’ll integrate the templates on the “Create survey” page. But this is only a warm up for what comes next…

We are counting on you!

At this point, we’d like to emphasize once again that this roadmap is open to discussion. We would really appreciate your contribution to making Survs a better service.

Although we are still working on the price details you deserve to know what we have in mind.

Plans

There will be a free plan with some feature limitations, whereas all paid plans are full featured. The main differences are the number of users allowed in the account and the amount of responses per month:

• The Free plan will allow 1 user and 100 responses per month.

• The Basic plan will cost $19/month, allows 2 users and 2,000 responses per month.

• The Pro plan will cost $39/month, allows 4 users and 4,000 responses per month.

• The Premium plan will cost $119/month, allows 20 users and 24,000 responses per month.


Non-profit and academic institutions will have considerable discounts.

Promotional codes

One last note about the promotional codes mentioned in the “Account” section of the application. Sometimes we give promotional licenses to people and institutions that help us to test Survs. We also distribute licenses on our Twitter page from time to time… These promotional codes can be redeemed in the “Account” section.

Let us know if these prices are in line with what you were expecting :-).

What exactly does this mean? From now on new users don’t have to wait for an invite to join in, they can start using Survs right away.

Survs is getting tremendous feedback, so we believe it’s time to launch public Beta.

As usual, we’re counting on all of you to spread the good word ;-).

Thanks for all the support!

While Survs is in beta we cannot contribute monetarily. However, we do want to make the public promise to always support organizations committed to help the ones in need.

In the first months after the official launch the only way we can help is by granting free or discounted access to Survs to some of these organizations. In the future, we’ll try to give a part of our profits to organizations with a philanthropic orientation.

So if you are a member of a non-profit organization that fits this profile, get in touch with us and we’ll see how we can help :-)

However, it was not enough. You wanted to analyze the data you got from Survs in statistical software packages, like SPSS and others. We’ve listened to your feedback and made some dramatic improvements to Survs data exporting features:

• Individual responses can now be exported in textual or numerical formats. Numerical is just what you need to import and crunch your data using some of the powerful statistical apps on the market. And yes, we support numerical data in Excel or CSV file formats, so you don’t need to worry about getting tied to a specific vendor.
• We’ve tweaked the column headers to make it easier to use your files with other applications. Single row headers that are more third-party-friendly and even automatically generated short labels to be used as variable names, we got it all.
• Also, the channel name is now part of the exported data too.

Keeping our users’ data as open and interoperable as possible is an essential goal for us, and this is a very important step in that direction.

• Internationalization is the process of designing a software application that can be adapted to various languages and regions.
• Accessibility guidelines encourage the creation of websites that can reach as many people as possible regardless of ability, location, age or technology.

The first step in this direction was to fully support user-customizable survey languages, which we have since the early days of the beta period.

Furthermore Survs has a template system for survey languages that allows users to create and apply languages sets to any survey.

Today we are happy to announce another advance in this matter: the ability to choose text direction in the survey language. This is very useful if you want the survey written in middle eastern languages such as Hebrew and Arabic which are written predominantly right-to-left.

You can find this option when editing a survey language:

If you have any comments or suggestions, feel free to contact us or post a reply here.

1. First of all, Survs was built in a user-centric fashion, with the goal of providing a great user experience. It has a very powerful set of features, carefully designed so they won’t get in your way. Start with the basics and then slowly discover everything else you can do with Survs in your own time. As you’ll see, we are strong believers in the progressive disclosure concept; there’s a lot of power hidden beneath Survs’s primary screens.
2. Secondly, in contrast to other survey applications who have only met role-based permissions on a later phase (or not at all), Survs was built from the ground up with collaborative work in mind. You’ll notice the difference.
3. Thirdly, it has some original social features like sharing survey and theme templates, and there is a lot more inventive stuff to come. For us, an online survey can be much more than a digital version of a paper one.
4. Fourthly, it will have a very competitive pricing. We absolutely guarantee that you’ll not be disappointed.

If you are already a Survs user you know what we are talking about. If not, why don’t you try it out and see for yourself?

So, what’s new?

• a brand new interface
• a welcome page with all you need to start making surveys right away
• help files
• new themes
• RSS feeds include survey response notifications
• Survs Terms of Service and Privacy Policy

But this is only the beginning, we have a lot of ideas up our sleeves…

In the past we’ve asked you to be discreet about Survs, now we’ll ask you the opposite. Please help us spread the word and tell all your friends and colleagues that there’s a new survey tool in town!

For those of you who want to help us promote Survs, we’ve prepared a media kit with all you need to talk about Survs.

So what are you waiting for? Try it now!

Here’s how:

• To share a survey template just go to your survey list and choose “Share” from the “More actions” menu. When you share a survey as a template, you are only sharing your survey’s structure and questions with others. Answers will not be shared.
• To share a theme template, click on the “Themes” tab, select the theme you want to share, and click the “Share” link.

When others open your template’s URL they’ll be able to import that template into their account. By importing a template users are effectively copying it into their account. This means that any subsequent changes made to the shared theme or survey template will not be reflected on their copies.

A Christmas present from Survs!

To show you how to import a template, we have designed a special theme for this season called “Asking for Christmas” (click the link to view and import it) :).

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

This kind of approach is perfectly normal when someone doesn’t know the “rules of the game”, but leads to low response rates, filling errors and too many questions which ultimately will just be ignored - either because they don’t contribute to the survey goals or because there was no time to analyze them.

To help avoid these problems, we have prepared 8 quick tips that will significantly improve your surveys without much effort. Our goal is to provide all Survs’s users with a quick guide to start building successful surveys right away.

1. Plan it!

Before you start designing your survey, ask yourself: Why am I doing this survey? What are my goals? What do I want to know?

2. Short is beautiful

Keep in mind that the shorter the survey is, the greater are the chances of having high response rates.

3. Introduce “yourself”

Start by explaining the survey’s purpose, how the results will be used and how long it will take.

4. Divide and conquer

Present your questions in logical groups, leaving the personal identification questions to the end of the survey.

5. Be clear and to the point

Speak the language of your audience and pay attention to the size and clarity of your questions: if the respondents have to read a question more than once, it means that it is too confusing.

6. Let it flow!

To avoid breaking the flow of the survey, try not to use many different types of questions. If you force your respondents to learn a different scale for every question your survey completion rate will surely decrease.

7. Protect yourself!

Be cautious about using open-ended questions (questions where the respondent answers in their own words) because they are much harder to analyze than closed-ended questions (questions where the respondent chooses between one or more answer options).

One of the must usual errors in online surveys (well, in all kind of surveys) is asking questions that end up never being analyzed. Remember that in online surveys short is beautiful ;-).

8. Test, test and test a little more!

Before launching your survey don’t forget to test it several times until it is finely tuned.