What does this mean? From now on, you can start building your surveys from one template without having to import it first.

The templates are available in English, German, French and Portuguese, but we’ll soon publish translations to other languages (so all our users can start from a template in their own language).

Please let us know what you think about the templates and which ones you would like to see added to the set.

Here is an example:

http://www.survs.com/template/96OVM5WF

But it gets even better, you can drop the www and use only:

http://survs.com/template/96OVM5WF

Now it’s much easier to copy and paste them to wherever you want :-).

From now on, you’ll be able to choose if you want to show the numbering of pages and questions or not. You can also decide if the question numbering shall be continuous throughout the entire survey or if numbering shall start at the beginning of each page. But that’s not all…

We’ve updated the interface and added a new tab to the Edit Survey section, where you can not only define your page and question numbering options, but also edit other aspects of your survey. This may seem a small change, but we think it will have a big impact on the overall user experience.

Next we’ll be working on Survs’s question type set. Stay tuned!

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.

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.

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!

Survs was built with collaborative work in mind, and inviting your teammates to join your account is just the first step towards working together with them.

Soon we will write about other collaborative features, but for now let’s focus on the account concept.

Picture this: you have an account shared with some of your colleagues at work and, at the same time, you have another account where you create surveys for the parent-teacher association you belong to. With Survs you can have a different account for different projects and still use the same credentials to login.

To allow for some control over who can do what inside an account, you can assign one or more roles to each account member.

There are 6 different roles:

• Viewer (the voyeur, can watch but can’t play)
• Editor (the builder, can create and edit surveys)
• Distributor (the bridge with your respondents, can create and open channels to collect responses)
• Analyzer (the analytics guy, can analyze, share, export and print results)
• Manager (the master helper, can do management tasks)
• Owner (the master of all roles, can do everything)

We think these roles contemplate the majority of usage scenarios, but we are expecting your feedback to let us know if we are on the right track.

Have fun using Survs!

Well, we’re happy to share a bit of what’s coming up.

Pricing model

The pricing model will be based on monthly plans that should be between $20 and $60, with special prices for annual subscriptions.

All accounts will be subscribed to a plan, each of them with different features and level of service. We are currently tuning these so that our audience can find a plan that suits them nicely.

However, we can tell you already that the main difference between the various plans will be the number of users allowed in the account and the maximum number of responses per month.

Finally, there will also be a free plan, enough for everyone to try out Survs and conduct small surveys without compromise.

Types of questions

We get asked a lot about the question types currently available.

Survs currently has the types of questions we thought would be essential and serve most of our users’ needs. We will, however, be adding more types based on your feedback. So be sure to tell us what you need!

New design

After lots of feedback from our users (thank you guys!) and some user research, we are working on a new design that we think will significantly improve Survs’s user experience.

You can take a sneak peak below:

Soon all of you will be able to play with it ;-).

Want to try out Survs?

By now we are sending invites almost every day, so what are you waiting for? We are asking for you…