Know-How Exchange : Research/Metrics

1) Support for foreign languages
2) Existing templates to make the surveys professional
3) Ability to reuse survey layout for other survey
4) For free text input: ability to validate data (email address, zip code, phone number, etc.)
5) Indication of required answers
6) Email survey writer when someone completes a survey
7) Produce survey results in attractive report

I think if you were e-mailing survey results, you'd amalgamate them at the end of a specified period - day, week, month etc. One neat trick would be to be able to send the survey results directly to a Zoho or Google spreadsheet.

Re validation, e-mail is useful. However with postal codes, each country has a unique system so worth thinking about that carefully.

One really nice feature that I've not seen anywhere would be the option to randomly send different stimuli and questions to users. For example, suppose I wish to see whether people prefer advert 1 or 2, I could randomly send users each ad then ask the same questions. Alternatively you could randomise the order of stimuli.

I use online surveys regularly. I use them to do market research for small start-up companies. We do not typically have a list of targets so we post the survey in a combination of targeted forums (with permission of course) and paid banner advertising.

With the tool I currently use, I cannot see the site which referred the respondent to the survey (referring address). This would be a useful feature.

The ability to download the results into excel is really important. Most survey tools will let you export the overall results but it's great to be able to export the individual results in tabular format. From there they can be put into pivot tables or OLAP tools for further insight and segmentation.