This is part of our blog series about smart survey design for better panellist engagement and quality of research.
In this blog we are introducing the concept of empowering researchers to create their own advanced, interactive question types without the need of internal or external programming skills.
At QuenchTec we often get requests from our clients to create specialized question types with high levels of interactivity, as well as matching specific behavioural needs. Especially in today’s mobile centric environment, respondents expect engaging and interesting surveys.
Traditionally such special requests ended up in lengthy and sometimes expensive custom development projects. Once created these custom developed question types were mostly limited to the use for the one survey they had been created for, with little to no easy edit possibilities to reuse such question types for other surveys.
To overcome such limitations we have introduced the concept of customisable, interactive questions modules. We call them iQuests – short for interactive questions.
Our survey design platform creates a highly structured HTML page where all elements of a question have different classes and id’s, combined with a sophisticated event model and API’s. As a consequence of this set up the iQuests can easily be created on top of our survey design platform without needing any programming skills; they can become part of the survey library for easy selection when creating a survey.
During the years we have created a series of these bespoke iQuests for our clients in areas like Google Map integration, video tracing, conjoint, maxdiff, Delphi, EPG (electronic program guide), picture and video upload, budget modelling and many more.
Here is an example of an iQuest we created recently for one of our clients which wanted to be able to show pictures of various packaging schemes. For each product they wanted the respondent to be able to first select the parts of the package that they liked and then what they did not like. Each area of the packaging could have different shapes.
We are using HTML imagemaps to define each area of interest. As a user hovers over an area it will be highlighted and when selected a corresponding choice/code should be recorded in a “hidden” multiple-choice question.
The client can upload pictures with one click and then define the areas of interest using rectangles, circles or polygons. For each area they simply select which corresponding “code” should be ticked in the underlying “hidden” question. After defining all areas, this tool gives you the HTML of all the areas, which you simply paste into the iQuests settings.
The iQuest settings menu was created to include all the options the client would like to be able to tailor, like colours for hovering and selecting:
As a result, the client is now capable of creating any image maps to overlay pictures and bind it to any normal multiple-choice question.
An example can be seen here: