Mobile Researcher Community » 22.04.2009 release

New features: survey duplication and free instructions

Andi — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 14:16:31 +0000

Today we released two great new features – one for survey designers and another for the folks holding the purse strings.

Survey duplication gives designers the ability to copy an existing survey with a single click which can potentially save hours of work. Read more about the new feature here.

An update to our billing model makes using Mobile Researcher even more affordable. Blank responses and instructions will no longer be billed for. Read more about the change to the billing model here.

Blank responses and instructions are free

Andi — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 13:03:09 +0000

Those of you who have used Mobile Researcher commercially are probably familiar with the billing model which has been in place for some time now. For those who haven’t, essentially the cost charged per response is based on the number of fields which were prompted and captured during the conduction of a survey (an instruction is also considered a field, even though no data is collected).

In this model, only fields which are actually presented are billed for. For example: If, in a 25 question survey, a fieldworker was presented with an instruction and 9 questions (and not all 25 questions due to skip logic), 10 fields (9+1) would be billed for when receiving the response.

This model ensures that you only pay for the fields actually shown to the fieldworker.

What’s changed?

We’ve now taken this a step further and have upgraded our billing system to only bill for questions where a response is captured. As a result, if a fieldworker doesn’t enter a value for a question (only possible if you specify the question as optional of course) or if the field is an instruction, no credit will be deducted for that field.

We’ve implemented this new billing model for a few reasons:

Although we really feel that Mobile Researcher is an affordable solution when compared with just about every other option available, we wanted allow our users to be able to directly justify costs with the number of data elements actually captured.
We wanted to encourage the use of instructions where appropriate to improve the layout and clarity of our users’ surveys. With instructions now carrying no cost, hopefully this will achieve this goal.

This update will take immediate effect on all accounts – no action is required by existing users.

Thanks again for your continued support.

Survey duplication

Andi — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 12:18:54 +0000

A much requested, and long overdue feature is the ability to duplicate surveys. We added the ability to reuse existing questions some time ago but extending this ability to a full survey was a little more complex due to the possibility of survey logic, repeating regions and variable substitutions. I’m thrilled to announce that we’ve now released survey duplication capabilities.

How does it work?

It’s really simple to duplicate an existing survey. Users with a survey designer role can now access a new menu option from the Design sub-menu.

"Duplicate Survey" is the second menu option in the Design sub-menu

The entire survey, including skip logic, constraints and translations will be copied into a new survey (with the same name and the word “Duplicated” appended). Simply rename the new survey as needed. You can also then make any necessary changes to the new survey as though you had built it from scratch.

We hope that this new feature allows you to really work at creating some great templates which you can use to promote best practice within your organisation in terms of survey design.