Vovici offers online survey software and claims it’s “flexible enough to be used by everyone from beginners to advanced market research experts.” After some training and experience using the tool, I’d say that’s a mostly accurate claim.
The primary project for which we purchased Vovici requires extensive user research with at least three user groups over an extended period of time. We needed not only the ability to get user feedback, but also to control survey deployment and manage the resulting data for multiple audiences.

Some key learnings:

• The surveys are easy to create and flexible. There are a number of question types to choose from, and you can build logic into the surveys using piping1 and branching2 to create surveys that mimic the natural flow of a user interview.
• The survey question library makes it easy to create consistent survey questions (especially helpful when more than one author is creating the surveys).
• The look and feel of the surveys can be customized to reflect the client branding—easy to accomplish if you have CSS skills. We didn’t, but were able to leverage another team member’s skills.
• There are a variety of reporting and analysis options from which to choose. In addition, filters allow you to slice and dice the data (some programming knowledge will definitely come in handy if your slicing and dicing needs are complex).
• The portal provides survey participants access to their active and upcoming surveys. The portal is configurable and is mostly easy to use (although as user experience designers, we can’t help but ask why some design decisions were made…).
• The portal community tool has the ability to set up user profiles and associate users within the community to these profiles (which is very helpful in analyzing survey data across user profiles). The tool also helps associate survey responses with users by means of their session data.
• In terms of support, we did face some challenges with the initial set up and it took us many conversations and emails to get things going.
• Greatest learning? Test, test, and test again. Create surveys, send them to yourself and your friends, and experiment with how to display the results. It’s the only way to ensure your questions will yield the data that allows you to best communicate the results to stakeholders.

This was our experience so far. What online survey tools have you used? What was that experience like?

[1] Piping helps carry text from one question to the next depending on the participants’ previous answer.
[2] Branching helps direct the participants to the next appropriate question based how they answered the previous question.

Tags: Survey Tool, Vovici