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Show HN: Survey Builder with Drag/Drop Logic Branching

165 pointsby martinaglvover 12 years ago

31 comments

nathanbarryover 12 years ago
Wow, this looks really good. I've spent some time designing UIs to solve the same problem, and you've done a better job than I did.<p>I just have a couple thoughts:<p>1. Give the demo by pointing out things in the actual application. Psuedo UIs or presentations aren't nearly as effective.<p>2. Allow me to use the scroll function (in both directions, like on a trackpad or magic mouse) to move around the interface. At first I thought it was broken before I realized I needed to click and drag.<p>3. When dragging a question to reorder, change it so that you are dragging the actual question, not a copy of the question. Leave a dashed border around where the question was.<p>I often find it helpful to highlight the drop-able areas as well, but this may not make sense for this use case.<p>4. Make the Settings and Delete icons on the questions more clear. Since they are hidden in the bubbles it is hard to tell what the icon actually is. Be clear first, clever second. If one of those has to go, get rid of clever. (paraphrasing Jason Fried)<p>Very nicely done. Keep iterating and you'll have a great product.
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flyosityover 12 years ago
Very cool, I built something similar for a marketing application called Bronto a few years back. Here's a screenshot:<p><a href="http://cl.ly/LMn2" rel="nofollow">http://cl.ly/LMn2</a><p>Same kind of in-out flow but for marketing, sending emails, segmenting contacts, etc. The fun part was drawing the bezier curves using canvas between each node!
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columboover 12 years ago
I have some experience in this area, here is my wishlist that I haven't seen yet in dynamic survey/assessment builders:<p>1 - Form Item labeling. I can't say "First Name" = 'firstName' in wufoo, instead it gives it an arbitrary id of form_1_154. This is BS and means I have to create a mapping table.<p>2 - Embed on site. Give the ability to embed the form as-is on an existing website without having to rely on an iframe or other such hacks.<p>3 - API. API. API. Allow the creation, deletion, edit, export, and import of form information.<p>4 - Internationalization. Allow me to translate my text in X languages.<p>5 - Reporting. This is where wufoo really has a good setup.
ayanbover 12 years ago
I love the 'Story' Page. Honest, passionate, ballsy. Hold on to the fire, dude!<p>"Visimojo is developed by Martin Angelov, a 23 year old developer / designer from Bulgaria. What makes this project interesting is that it shows how a kid from the farthest corners of Europe can build a service that can teach the incumbents in a $7 billion industry a thing or two about interface design."
mrcrassicover 12 years ago
My screen's resolution is 1200x1920, which is, apparently, not big enough to run this...?
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martinaglvover 12 years ago
I am the creator of Visimojo and I will be happy to answer your questions. The app is still in beta and my todo list is rather long, but I decided to release it publicly and collect some feedback.
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vlokshinover 12 years ago
This is really great. I love how you did the google docs demo as the starter modal.<p>Looks like a great product, but I think most of the people building these would be less technical. I saw "rick click to delete" while on mac/chrome, there's no mouse play built in.<p>Maybe consider simplifying the initial screen to just one block and a "do this next" message so that the user can try it? At least for lesser tech users, if you can define where they're coming from (or more often).<p>ex: split facbeook / twitter / HN traffic in and make assumptions as to what kind of users are coming from where.
WesleyJohnsonover 12 years ago
I worked for a mystery shopping company for about 4 years and we relied heavily on surveys. There are some of the things we ran into with our "system" that I thought I'd share.<p>1. It would nice to have more advanced logic. For example, if I had a matrix question ranking my like or dislike of an array of sports, it would be nice to allow control flow so that I could ask follow up questions on sports I didn't like. You could do that now with separate questions for each sport (Do you like basketball? Yes/ No -&#62; Explain), but if you rated them in a matrix there is really no way to do that as far as I can tell.<p>2. Using previous answers as variables of following questions. (What did you order for lunch? Sub/Pizza) -&#62; (Did your find your %answer% to your liking)? You could accomplish this by having the Sub answer follow one path and the Pizza answer follow another path. But that would create separate questions for reporting when really you just wanted to know if they enjoyed their order, but you'd like to personalize the question based on their own answers.<p>3. Another logic example might be that regardless of an answer on question A, you'll go to question B, but question B might have some of it's options disabled based on the answer to question A. Again, your system could handle this by branching each answer on question A to it's own path with a modified version of question B only showing the relevant options, but I would again assume that this would create separate question B's in reporting when you might not want that.<p>I do realize these are edge cases and someone needing this functionality might not be your target audience. Just thought I'd share.<p>Great, great job so far. As others have said, it looks really good and I found it really intuitive.
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GFischerover 12 years ago
I wanted to try it, but it's not answering at the moment.<p>I've used Google Consumer Surveys and Survata (highly recommended :) <a href="http://survata.com/" rel="nofollow">http://survata.com/</a> ) recently, and I didn't feel constrained by the survey choices. Did you detect a market need for this?
ianpriover 12 years ago
Really nice an intuitive, the only thing I couldn't seem to do is assign multiple flags to one answer?
justhwover 12 years ago
Awesome. Put a notice notifying we need to click and drag the board to move around. By default we tend to use our mouse scrolls. You can simplly put a css `cursor:move` property on the dragable area to let us know its dragable.
arikrakover 12 years ago
Nice. I think you should try to make it more space-efficient so people can view it on smaller screens. The boxes can be packed closer together, even if you keep a fixed grid.<p>I wonder if you could also let it serve as a Wizard for people basides just a questionnaire. So it would suggest results based on a user's choices. (That could include links, but I don't it should automatically re-direct to the page.)<p>Depending on how simple you want to keep it, it might make sense to add a more advanced logic than just checking one boolean. For example, maybe let a later box depend on which specific choice was chosen earlier.
robflynnover 12 years ago
This is great. I'm building something exactly like this for internal company usage. We have a few different parts of the site that involve surveys (though I called them dynamic wizards). We occasionally need to tweak the flow so I have versioning capability added.<p>I initially started with a DSL that would generate everything for me but I decided a UI would be nicer.<p>Great job. Ours will never be available for public consumption and has to be tightly integrated into our site so it'll never see any kind of third party usage, but it's nice to see someone else doing it too!
AlexanderZover 12 years ago
Remove the "Next" button when it's not necessary (when there can be only one answer to the question). Just go to the next question when a user clicks on an answer to the current question.
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agnokapatheticover 12 years ago
Although the market is substantially smaller, this would be really cool to mash-up with Twilio to create Interactive Voice Response menus (Press 1 to get your account balance, Press 2 to speak to a representative, etc).<p>You could also allow users to select Text-to-speech or integrate eLance or <a href="http://www.voices.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.voices.com/</a> and sell human voice-overs.
krmmalikover 12 years ago
Not trying to be facetious but doesn't Poll Daddy solve the branching issue now? How does your product compare to something like Poll Daddy for the like to like features? Is it as easy to share/embed and view reports etc?<p>What I'm really looking for is a surveying solution that helps me conduct Relative Importance Testing. I haven't seen that anywhere out in the market.
propercoilover 12 years ago
"Visimojo works best on screens that are at least 1280x720. Maximize the window to enjoy it fully." my resolution is higher
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sathishmanoharover 12 years ago
Wow! I've imagined about his kind of polling product. Two thumbs up for making this possible.<p>I have a suggestion along the lines of what nathanbarry suggested, I thought using scroll to zoom in and zoom out, and having collapsible (tree structure like) questions will make it easy for users to create long polls.<p>All the best :)
tomasz_lover 12 years ago
Like it - but price is putting ME off. Would you consider per survey, instead of per month, pricing plan?
SanjayUttamover 12 years ago
This is really great work.<p>Slightly off-topic; there have been a ton of great submissions "Show HN" posts lately. I find myself signing up for most of them just because I either think they are useful right now or will be very shortly. This is no exception. Keep up the great work all.
shuttonover 12 years ago
Looks really nice, like the idea of visually laying out the survey, I guess this is what people do with pen and paper anyway. Some way of customizing the style of the survey would be useful for embedding on your own site.
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arthurquerouover 12 years ago
Amazing service, the only thing missing (and that would stop me from using it) is the ability to check the Free Text input with a regexp (to be sure that the user input is a valid email, phone number etc...)
drumdanceover 12 years ago
Very nice! I'm curious how well it scales for long surveys. I used to work at SurveyGizmo and some of their customers would build epically long surveys, sometimes dozens of pages.
dokunievover 12 years ago
Check out another good project that is trying to re-invent the survey/form space <a href="http://www.typeform.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.typeform.com</a>
hussfeltover 12 years ago
2 more things: Autosave would be awesome!<p>Missing scrolling with the mouse, now I need to drag to scroll... Scrolling with the trackpad on a Mac would be so neat!
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davidbrentover 12 years ago
I find it awesome that your survey tool functions very well, but also that it is performing so well under the load of HN #1 thread. Nice work!
oftenwrongover 12 years ago
For the sake of accessibility, I suggest adding the necessary functionality to allow users to zoom in using their browser (C-+ or C-=).
tucsonover 12 years ago
Is there a way to ask an open question (no list of predefined answers, but a text box for the user's answer) ? I cannot find it.
septerrover 12 years ago
Looks great, don't have time to go through it in detail right now, but first impression - the ui and idea are awesome.
thisoneover 12 years ago
quite interesting, I'll have to take a closer look at what you've done.<p>My employment for the past 6 months has been on a wide and deep dataset collection tool, one that takes in arbitrary questions that can have both validation rules and workflow rules applied.<p>Getting the tooling designs correct and usable seems to be the hardest part.
chrishennover 12 years ago
Are you using jsPlumb? I just spent some time on a project that uses jsPlumb for a similar effect.