Hosted Survey™ Features

Hosted Survey™ is the premier web survey and online, interactive research software chosen by researchers, educators and performance improvement specialists all over the world. Working with industry experts and our customers from the very beginning, we have developed software applications for you that combine grace, simplicity and ease of use with the powerful and robust feature set most requested by your peers.

Configure and Personalize

You have total control over the look and feel of your survey, invitations, confirmations and reports. We do not require you to carry our advertisements, banners, disclaimers or annoying pop-ups, pop-unders or page re-directs.

You can specify the fonts, colors, styles and backgrounds of almost all the different text elements. You can add your organization's logo, branding, watermark and other artwork and images to the page layout, and personalize the wording of user prompts, buttons, labels and messages. When your survey is complete, your respondents will be taken where you want them to go.

Question Types

Hosted Survey offers twenty different question types and textual/visual elements for your use in the development of your survey questionnaires and feedback forms.

1. Multiple Choice, Select All That Apply (Check boxes)
   
   
2. Multiple Choice, Select Just One (Radio buttons)
   
   
3. Multiple Choice, Select Just One (Drop down list boxes)
   
   
4. Multiple Choice, Select and Rate™ (Select multiple answers and then rate them)
   
   
5. Comments or Essay (Unlimited length, open-ended text)
   
   
6. Open-ended Text (User-defined length, 1 to 1,000 characters)
   
   
7. Rating Scale (Choose a position on a horizontal or vertical scale)
   
   
8. Summation Question Set (Open-ended numeric answers must add up to a specified total)
   
   
9. Matrix Question Set, Single (Series of questions using the same scale in columns)
   
   
10. Matrix Question Set, Double (Series of questions using the same two-part scale in columns)
    
    
11. Conditional Question Branch or Skip (Dynamically hide, display or branch to optional questions based on previous answers)
    
    
12. Random Order Question Sets (A series of sets of questions, displayed in random order to reduce bias in responses)
    
    
13. Page Heading, Break (Textual element in special font, always starts a new page)
    
    
14. Section Heading (Textual element in special font, breaks up a single page into sections for readability)
    
    
15. Section Text (Textual element, unlimited characters, can include links to documents, related material, and multimedia elements)
    
    
16. [Coming Soon!] Section Image (Multimedia element, not requiring a link to URL)
    
    
17. [Coming Soon!] Open-ended Text, Multi-part (User-defined length, as well as user-defined number of seperate input boxes)
    
    
18. [Coming Soon!] Matching Question Set (Match the answers in one column with the questions in another column)
    
    
19. [Coming Soon!] Attachment (Upload and attach a file to the survey as a response to a question)
    
    
20. Custom (User-defined question type, requires custom programming, and a modest fee for development... but we'll do just about anything you need)

Advanced Question and Answer Options

• Required Answer (Respondent cannot submit page unless a response is given to the question)

• Random Answer Sequence (Randomly re-orders set of answer options differently for each survey respondent)

• Do Not Randomize Answer (Randomly re-orders some of the answer options, but keeps others in fixed position)

• User-defined Data Types (User can specify data type for open-ended questions as alpha, numeric, mixed, positive integer, data/time, etc.)

• User-defined Data Constraints (User can specify the range of allowed characters for open-ended questions, and the range of valid numeric input for summation question sets)

• "None of the Above" Answer (For check boxes, if this answer is selected, all other answers are automatically deselected, and vice-versa)

• Subtotals and Rolling Totals (User can specify subtotals/rolling totals for section-level computations in long/complex summation question sets)

Survey Design and Editing Options

Survey designers have the option of starting from scratch, copying and editing new versions of existing surveys, importing, combining, merging and editing survey templates or individual questions and answers from your Question & Answer Library, or importing and editing stock surveys from Hostedware's library of survey examples.

Editing functions include the ability to easily insert questions at any point in a survey, move or re-sequence questions in a survey, delete questions in a survey, and use standard Copy/Paste functions to copy text from one place to another.

At any time during the survey design process, you can preview your survey to see exactly how it will look online for your respondents. One click invokes the survey in "Test Mode." You can then take the survey, from beginning to end, testing for content, style, usability, and the proper working of various navigation controls, data constraints, required fields, user messages and optional links to supporting material, artwork, or multimedia, etc. Your responses will be processed, but not permanently saved.

All formatting, layout, navigation and configuration options are available via our point-and-click web interface. No scripting or memorization of special commands, codes or languages is required. Optionally, you can embed HTML formatting and JavaScript commands into your questions, answers, message text and emails to achieve sky's-the-limit special effects, and additional control over the look, feel and functionality of your survey.

[Coming Soon!] Spell check your survey using JSpell (will be available as part of our software application service).

Survey Administration and Respondent Invitations

You control the duration (start and end) of your survey. The duration can range from a single day to weeks, months or even years. You also control who can take your survey, whether it is open to the public or only to a pre-defined list or panel, and how many times a survey can be taken by the same IP address or computer. And you control whether the survey has to be completed in one session, or participants can exit and resume later; and if they can, whether they can go back and change previous responses, go forward only and not back to prior pages, and whether they can re-enter unconditionally or only until they have submitted the last page of the survey.

Each survey is assigned a unique survey code. If your target audience or panel of respondents is known upfront, you can assign each respondent an ID or password as well. Hosted Survey's respondent management features allow you to enter or upload a list of names, email addresses and related contact and demographic information (including user-defined fields) from an Excel spreadsheet.

The email invitation system allows you to invite participants using a personalized and tailored message. Each email is sent out individually (no bulk email with copies or blind copies, cc/bcc), and can be personalized with a greeting name and other optional information and customized prompts and text. Invited participants can launch the survey with a single click from their email invitation.

You can monitor who has responded and who has not. You can configure a confirmation email to notify the survey administrator each time a respondent completes a survey, and you can send periodic reminder notices to those who have not yet completed their survey.

Another popular invitation option is to provide a link to your survey on a pop-up window, which is displayed when a web site visitor leaves your site, closes their browser, exits a particular page, or completes or abandons a particular process. Pop-up windows can be configured to appear only once for each visitor, for random visitors, or on a regular basis with specified time intervals.

Online Reports, Real-time Results

You can view up-to-the-minute statistics about your survey at any time. One click gives you immediate access to an up-to-the-moment online report with frequency counts and percentages. More complex configurable reports are also available, with options available to view results and various statistics by demographic groupings, respondent data, and other filters. Comments reports are available and can be sorted, filtered, and optionally identified to the author or anonymous.

You can download your results data to a file on your computer. This file is in an industry-standard tab-delimited, Microsoft® Excel, Access or XML format, and is ready for immediate use. You can easily import it into your favorite database or statistical analysis software, or send it electronically to your back-office information systems.

(Fully-automated, scheduled, custom-configured data transfer options are available, and can be set up very quickly and cost-effectively.)

When designing surveys, question and answer coding is available for multi-lingual and longitudinal surveys, and to simplify data manipulation, statistical analysis, data storage, and to eliminate any embedded HTML coding.

Question & Answer (Q&A) Library

Pre-defined and re-usable questions and answers can be created and saved in your personal Q&A Library. Survey templates can be created that enable you to create a survey once and customize it for multiple projects, clients or periods. Click to import a template into your new survey, and then modify as needed. Multiple templates can be combined to create one survey. Customers who conduct a variety of types of surveys can categorize your library questions using "Survey Types." This feature optimizes your ability to organize large libraries, and find what you need when you need it.

From the beginning Hosted Survey™ was developed to be the most flexible and adaptable survey software application available. We remain committed to ongoing improvements to our online software products. We review all feedback, and give serious consideration to all of the requests for improvements that will benefit you and our customers most.

Click here to create your first survey right now. If you need any assistance or have any questions, feel free to call us (and talk to a real person) toll free at (800) 211-6967, or (949) 585-1500. Or, send email to customerservice@hostedware.com. We'll respond today, if possible, or always by the next business day.