Survs

Enough Pepper today announced it has added Survs to the Google Apps Marketplace™, Google’s recently launched online storefront for Google Apps™ products and services.

Some time ago we were surprised with an invitation from the Google Apps™ team to be one of 50 Google Apps Marketplace™ launch companies. We spent the last months working hard with Google to guarantee the integration and it is with great joy that we announce today the official launch.

The Google Apps Marketplace makes it easy to discover, purchase and deploy integrated business applications and related professional services.

Survs is now integrated with Google Apps allowing not only the access to the application using Google Apps Single Sign-On and also to export survey results into a Google Spreadsheet. After installing Survs on your Google Apps account you can access it using the same links you use to navigate the Google Apps suite.

If you’re a Google Apps user and want to integrate Survs on your domain, just follow these instructions.

Google, Google Apps Marketplace, Google Apps, Gmail, Google Talk, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Sites, and Google Video are trademarks of Google Inc.   

Survs has a lot of users who work in the user experience design field, so we decided to offer them a little gift… How about 10% off the price of a conference for user experience professionals, with a fabulous set of world renowned speakers (Jared Spool, Steve Krug, Peter Merholz…)?

We’re sponsoring the User Experience Lisbon, taking place in Lisbon between the 12th and 14th of May, and would love to meet some of our users there. Just use the code SURVS2010 when signing up for the conference and you’re done!

See you all in Lisbon :-).

We’ve made a partnership with our good friends of myGengo, a great online translation service located in Japan. They have been using Survs for some time, and we thought it was a good idea to collaborate on the translation of our survey and language templates.

For starters, they have translated Survs’s templates to five new languages: Japanese, Spanish, Chinese, Russian and Italian. myGengo also provided us with two new language templates: Russian and Japanese.

Just log in to your account, click the New Survey tab and pick the language of your choice :-).

We’ve been working on some of Survs’s templates to help our users to start from a solid basis. Until now we’ve released five templates:

• Customer Satisfaction Survey (Service)
• Customer Satisfaction Survey (Product)
• Event Evaluation Survey
• Employee Satisfaction Survey
• Web application survey

These templates will soon be included into the Create survey page. Meanwhile, you can import them to your accounts. Just click the above links and choose the account you want to import the templates to. It’s as easy as that.

If you want, feel free to translate the templates to your language and share them with other users. Survs is all about building things together and sharing knowledge :-).

Some of you have complained about the length of Survs’s survey and template URLs, so we decided to make them shorter!

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 :-).

After our public launch, we offered one month of the Premium plan to all beta users. This period will end on the 22nd of October. On that day, all beta accounts will be downgraded automatically to the Free plan unless you take action and choose otherwise. If you wish to keep your Premium plan or choose another subscription plan, you can do so by going to your Account page and clicking the “Change plan” link.

Even if you are downgraded to the Free plan, you’ll still have access to all your survey responses and you can upgrade your account at any time. There are no strings attached!

A special thanks to our beta users for helping us build Survs. It wouldn’t be possible without you :-).

Yes, the big day has come: today, we’re officially launching Survs!

And what’s the best way to celebrate this day? Reveal the secret sauce :-).

The goal

It all started with a dream of an experienced and passionate team who wanted to simplify the way people did surveys online… We rolled up our sleeves and started to work having one goal in mind: build an online survey tool that got things done while providing a great user experience. Nothing more, nothing less.

How we did it?

By involving users in the design process from the first sketches to the “final” product, practicing what we like to call collaborative design. Most of all, we know how important it is to listen and engage in conversations with the users.

So, you see, there is no big secret in making an online survey tool like Survs , it’s all about you :-).

The result?

Survs has a powerful set of features, which are carefully designed so the advanced features won’t get in your way when you don’t need them . Everyone can start playing with the basics and then slowly discover everything else that can be done with Survs.

And again our users helped us – people quickly understood our approach and the word spread out like fire:

• “If anyone needs to make a survey for any reason at all, YOU MUST try Survs!” Matthew Smith – Squared Eye
• “We have been using Survs for several months now and are delighted with its superb usability and features.” John Henry – JustGiving
• “Survs is to online surveys as Gmail is to web-based email. Seriously good!” Eric Stoller
• “Survs is an amazing online survey tool. I reviewed it a couple of weeks ago along with Google docs and SurveyMonkey and it absolutely nailed the competition” Paul Seys – Redweb

Besides a press release, until today we haven’t spent a single dollar on marketing. If we are writing this post today it’s because of our users. One by one, people started to talk about Survs and when we least expected Survs was on Techcrunch, ReadWriteWeb and being considered the best online survey tool by the .net magazine!

This is only the beginning…

It’s never too much to thank you all. Without your help, building and promoting Survs wouldn’t have been possible. But we’re only warming up…

And don’t worry, we’re not going to bloat Survs with endless and meaningless features. instead we’ll focus on improving the features we have and slowly introduce more innovations to the online surveys world. As usual, we’re counting on your feedback :-).

Today we’re announcing a new pricing model based on our users’ feedback!

We also want to explain why we didn’t take some of your suggestions, so make sure you read until the end.

Plans

There will be a free plan with some feature limitations, whereas all paid plans are fully featured. The main differences are the number of users allowed in the account and the amount of responses per month.

Monthly plans

• The Free plan will allow 1 user and 200 (we doubled the number!) responses per survey.
• The Basic plan will cost $19/month, allow 2 users and 2,000 responses per month. Extra responses will be charged at $0.04 per response.
• The Pro plan will cost $39/month, allow 4 users and 4,000 responses per month. Extra responses will be charged at $0.03 per response.
• The Premium plan will cost $119/month, allow 24 users and 24,000 responses per month. Extra responses will be charged at $0.01 per response.

Yearly plans

We decided to offer annual subscriptions of our paid plans which will be to the benefit of our most active users. The features set and number of users allowed per account stay the same.

It works like this: if you sign for a one year subscription of one of our plans, you’ll only pay for 10 months. But that’s not all… All yearly subscriptions will allow unlimited responses!

Non-profit and academic institutions will have a 30% discount on both monthly and yearly plans.

Why doesn’t Survs have a “single survey option”?

Some of you asked for a “single survey option”, but we think our model already allows to do that. If you want to make only one survey you just have to subscribe for a month and and then downgrade to the free plan. All your data will still be available. There are no strings attached.

However, as we said about our roadmap, nothing is set in stone, and we may reconsider this in the future.

Why isn’t the response limit of the free plan isn’t higher?

We’ve listened to your arguments and decided to double the number of responses per survey! We think this is perfect for individual users and small businesses who just want to do a small survey.

This is not a closed process…

Probably we won’t make any significant changes to the pricing before the public launch, but we are always alert to what you have to say. So don’t hesitate to give us your opinion :-).

In this post, we’ll highlight some of the survey results, explain why research is important for us, and give you a little gift at the end :-).

As the survey results demonstrated, people tend to describe Survs as having a perfect balance between power and simplicity. We can only reach that goal with your continued help. Thank you all for your support and patience.

Results

We have gained a lot of insight from your responses and suggestions, here are some highlights:

• 98% of our most frequent users say they would probably or definitely recommend Survs to a friend or colleague.
• 81% of our most frequent users are satisfied or very satisfied with Survs.
• People use Survs mainly for user research, market research, academic research and business.
• The two most important factors for choosing Survs are design and features.
• The reason for most users being satisfied is “ease of use”.
• The word most often used to describe survs is “Easy”

Besides these results we’re also glad about your suggestions: they are essential to help us improve.

In research we trust

And what will we do with this insight? Research without action is fruitless, these results will inform our decisions from now on. In fact, they already strongly influenced the definition of the Survs’s roadmap.

But the survey is only one of various techniques on our research toolbox, if you are open to participate in the others (usability tests, interviews, focus groups, etc.) please drop us a line. We’ll be generous to those participating ;-).

One more thing…

We know a many of you use Survs for customer research, so we decided to share our survey template. Feel free to use it, mix it and share it as you wish:

http://www.survs.com/template?tmUID=VI28GO4U

If this one doesn’t serve your needs, don’t be sad, we’ll be sharing other survey templates from now on :-).

We won’t tell you any lies. We’re totally focused on building Survs’s payment system, so that we may officially launch Survs after the end of the summer. That being said, we want you to know our roadmap for the future.

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.