The Beetrieve Buzz

We just released Laguna Survey 2.2 on our servers.

This release updates functionality in different places in Laguna Survey, and seeks simply to update aspects of the program where there was room to improve. The updated features are:

• In surveyCanvas, a new element 'Video'. You can now (for starters) place YouTube videos directly in your survey, by cutting and pasting the embed code for a video from a YouTube page into surveyCanvas.

This should be great for marketing campaigns, product surveys etc.

This is a start. Even if it is quite easy to upload and use video from YouTube, we want to give our users more alternatives, both to the sources of video and the format. This will come in a later update.

• More powerful branching. Before, when setting up branching, you could specify a set of conditions and one target. Well, now you can specify multiple targets, in the Branching panel, for the question type Multiple Choice - one answer (radio buttons - the only question type this is feasible for).

This has been a request from some of our larger customers, and we responded. It makes it possible to set up very powerful rules for branching, and we frankly think this is one of the most powerful branching systems out there, and at the same time it is actually easy to use!

For this question type, you can specify as many targets as there are answer alternatives (if you have that many pages), including the 'Last page' and 'End Survey' alternatives.

• Sticky preferences. This has been a long time coming, we know, but now Laguna Survey at last has a flexible system for handling preferences that survive from session to session. The first thing we have implemented is remembering the states of the 'Autoscroll' and 'Show element frames' in surveyCanvas, and Autoscroll got it first for a good reason.

Autoscroll is a great feature when you start using surveyCanvas, because it always brings the currently selected element into view. So, it makes very good sense to enable Autoscroll by default.

However, some of our larger customers have started producing very advanced surveys, with the number of questions and pages reaching the 50-70 range. Now, Autoscroll starts to become a nuisance, because you have to wait for the survey to come down the line (an XML structure sent by way of AJAX) and then for the browser to render same, and then the autoscroll will kick in and scroll the page to the bottom of the survey, to the last question. This can take many seconds for large surveys, and is not optimal, especially if you know that you are actually going to change something in the beginning of the survey.

This situation is now remedied in a simple and effective way. Just uncheck Autoscroll, and then it is off. Until you choose to switch it on again. Next time you open surveyCanvas, no Autoscroll. So you can start working immediately.

• This version sneaks in a new element that is only visible to our subscribers: A Text line table. Although not a major addition, it is a very handy element, and makes for a more effective survey in specific situations. You can try this element out in the demo.

This is our way of starting to walk down a path that we think will lead to a standard version that will contain more or less what you see in Laguna Survey today, and a premium version that will contain more of the features that is important for a certain segment of the market. That is all we can communicate at the moment.

• We have rearranged and added commands in the Participants panel, and put them all into a command menu. We are very pleased with the result, check it out for yourself!

We've also done some major work to make Laguna Survey more robust.

There are certain characters that any webapp has a hard time swallowing as user input, especially for an advanced app like Laguna Survey, where user input at one time or another might be parsed into XML, sent in emails, added to mySQL tables, handed over to a Java servlet as labels to use for rendering a chart, output in Excel and Word files, and generally thown around by AJAX. At the same time, the app should be able to handle such 'unexpected' input without any problems. Before this release we went hunting for situations where problems had arisen for our users, and then tried to take a holistic approach to fixing it. We think the result in Laguna Survey 2.2 is that it is very robust indeed.

Some more specific bugs have also been dealt with:

• The Drop-down menu element didn't work properly in the browser Firefox.
• There was a problem resetting the Minimum/Maximum that can be selected in question type Multiple Choice - multiple answers.
• In some rare cases the diagram for Multiple Choice - multiple answers could fail to render correctly in Result Diagrams when branching had been used.

As we work on updating Laguna Survey and adding new features, there is one question we constantly ask ourselves: "What can we remove from the interface this time around?"

That may sound like a weird question to ask - after all, a new version is about new features, isn't it, not removing them? Yes, but nobody said anything about removing features. The trick, the real trick, the difficult part that way too many companies do not work hard enough on, is "How can we add this new cool features while at the same time keep the interface as simple, or even simpler, than before."

A simple interface means an non-confusing interface and an app that is easy to use. It is not true that adding features and making the application perform more advanced functions does by necessity increase the complexity of the interface. It is only common. Common because especially with enterprise app development, the simplicity of the interface often is not considered important enough to merit much thought. Features are considered much more important, and there is an unfortunate tendency in certain circles to think that a cluttered interface communicates an advanced feature set.

We think a cluttered interface communicates laziness in the development team. A clean, simple interface that can communicate its own state, and is discoverable for advanced users, is paramount. For the users, and for us. If the users can easily figure out the interface, that means they don't have to ask us about it. Which means we spend less resources on support and more on developing the next cool feature.

You don't have to be an interface genius to make a great interface. It is enough to do like we have done, to constantly think about it, and iterate. And iterate and iterate. We will get there eventually.

I'd like to offer up surveyCanvas as an example of this. surveyCanvas is our module for producing the survey questionnaire. We had a really cool idea for this task from early on, making it into a true AJAXy, DOM-manipulating, OO JS, real-time, WYSIWYG... well, you get the idea. That was the concept, and that part turned out to work great.

Now, to insert a new element in the questionnaire, you'd just use the correct tool on the Tool panel. This is how the Tool panel area looked like in an early beta of surveyCanvas (it was then called SurveyDesk):

The page that contained surveyCanvas had a header with company graphics, and a logo. Very much web-page-like. At this point we were still struggling to get that genuine web application look and feel going.

As you can see, the Tools panel stretches out over the width of the page, and there are buttons for each function. Upper row, labeled 'Insert', contains all the different things you can insert in the questionnaire, and the second row contains commands for manipulating the same.

The thinking behind this layout was very much to have everything instantly accessible with the click of a button. So our concept of simple was more or less "fast". One click, boom!

Well, simple does not necessarily equal fast, of course. There are other considerations. There are already too many elements here, not to mention what will happen as you start adding more types of elements and more commands.

So, iterate.

Much better! We gathered all element types into a drop-down menu. Visually, we can now add as many more types as we like without cluttering up the interface. We've however had to trade in some operational speed for clarity. You now have to click to open the menu, click to select item type, then click to insert it.

The header is now just one thin grey line, and even though Options now has been tabbed with Branching, everything looks much cleaner.

Notice that we also now call items precisely that, instead of 'nodes' as in the beta. Calling what you add to your questionnaire a 'node' is something only a programmer would do, which is precisely why that term ended up in the interface....

So, now we are ready to add some features. Iterate!

Turns out the Options panel need all the vertical space it can get for certain question types, especially on small monitors. And it seems the Tools panel doesn't need so much space, so better to let the Options panel take over some of the real estate. Looks cleaner, too.

By this stage we feel we have firmly established that the Tools panel pertains to the elements you put down in your questionnaire, so the labels to the left are superfluous and can be omitted. The header is also completely gone, as in a desktop app, as the browser window itself shows the title.

There are clearly now more elements in the Tool panel than the last iteration, because more features have been added. We are not saying you should never add more buttons to a release, only that you owe it to your users and your support staff to work as hard as you can on simplifying the interface. Apart from the new tools, we wanted to direct the user to the very helpful video tutorial, so it gained its own button, too. This is how surveyCanvas looked as of version 1.2.

For the next version we are planning several new features in surveyCanvas. This again presents the problem of potential clutter in the Tools panel. What to do?

Indeed, what to do? A constraint we always have to work within is that of being a web application, i.e. running inside a browser. This is a challenge sometimes because: a) we do not have access to normal application features like a standardised menu system, and b) because many users have certain expectations about how things work on the web, expectation which might contradict expected behaviour in a normal desktop application.

For instance, the concept of the link is at the heart of the web. But we think of, and want to communicate, Laguna Survey as an application, so we do not use normal links inside the app itself, as we think that would dilute the concept (yes, links have been seen in desktop apps, but we have to work actively to be seen as a 'real' app). However, there are many places in Laguna Survey where a command is little more than a link, like the 'Reference manual' and 'Video tutorial' in the Tools panel in the illustration above. These then are presented as simple, custom buttons. We feel it is not appropriate to use the <button> element for these tasks, because we think many users have a mental model of executing a 'real' command with such buttons on the web. 'Sign in!'. 'Submit!'. 'Upload!'. The distinction is however far from clear-cut in all cases, and we are still struggling with this.

As an aside, let me tell you a little secret. You know that "Starting Laguna Survey..." message you see after you've hit 'Log in' and before you see the Laguna Survey main window? Its purpose? Getting all the user's data from the databases and set set them up in a way to then be used in the app? No.

Transferring the user's mental state from 'surfing the web' to 'using an application'?

Correct! We think the 'Starting' message has a real and important function, but it is not a technical one. It only takes a second to get all data on a user from the back-end servers and construct the main window. The 'Starting' message is pure psychology; when the main window has been loaded, the user must really believe she is running a real app, because that is what we are trying to serve. The 'Starting' message allows a mental transition, a mental wormhole. Leaving the web page browsing of the Sonora IT web pages and emerging in something that serves a web application.

This fact is not widely known outside of the development department, and in Laguna Survey's lifespan, everybody else has so far just taken the 'Starting' message for granted. Nobody ever asks about it. Not our users and not anybody internally. It works.

Back to the main thread. Another pain is not having access to application menus. A desktop application can 'hide' much of its richness and feature set in its menus, ready to be discovered by the power user. A menu on a web page, however, is something completely different. These drop-down menus were only ever meant to be for choosing options in a form. They were never meant for selecting commands to be executed, like application menus, so they behave accordingly: The first item is not treated as a headline, when you select something, the menu is stuck on what you've selected, etc.

So what to do? Well, if we add more commands, we could gather them in a drop-down menu with an 'Execute' button beside it. But that just doesn't make sense. If you choose one of the commands from the menu, it is always because you want to execute it, so why should you have to choose the command, then press a button? Why not just execute the command immediately? It is after all a command menu.

It might not be what the user expects from a menu on the web. But we have decided that is the way forward anyway. We have to take certain liberties if we want to keep innovating, and maybe users are ready to start expecting a different behaviour in web applications anyway? So, this is what the Tools panel area is going to look like in the next version:

The commands that you can perform on the elements are now contained in a single menu. Whenever you choose one of them, it is immediately executed, and the menu springs back to show 'Edit', just like an application menu would.

"But why didn't you make some custom menus, if the normal ones were not meant for that use, and users expect them to behave differently?".

Glad you asked! In short, the built-in menus have some properties that makes a lot of sense to take advantage of. They are standard, for one thing. They may look a bit different from browser to browser, but their behaviour is well understood and consistent. They display were they are supposed to, scroll if necessary, and are always large enough to display all contained text, horizontally. You do not have to cook up some custom JS and CSS to try to duplicate those aspects. But the most important feature is that the browser knows that they are menus. This is important in a wider perspective, in regards to for instance accessibility.

It struck us that the menu for inserting the elements should then also behave like that. You only ever use it to insert elements, so why should you click an 'Insert' button after you've chosen what to insert? You shouldn't have to, of course. So now, just choose the element to insert, and it is immediately inserted.

Now we have a cleaner, simpler interface with room for more item types and more commands, and we've reduced the number of clicks to execute them from three to two. We've added some more auxiliary commands and options but the Tools panel still looks cleaner than in previous versions.

And yes, we're going to add multiple undo/redo in the next version. We have it working in-house and it rocks!

We are pleased to announce that we just released Laguna Survey version 2.1 to new and existing customers alike.

In this version we have focused on surveyCanvas and strengthening its feature set and interface. The headline features for this version are:

1. Undo/Redo
2. Insert/Edit menus are now true command menus
3. A redesigned Global options panel that looks and behaves great

1. That's right, surveyCanvas now sports a five-level undo/redo buffer, and it works just like you would expect in a desktop application.

In a way, this is a strange feature to tout. Any ol' application certainly has undo functionality, right? Yes, and it's something we have come to take for granted. In desktop applications, at least.

The situation is different for web applications. For one thing, applications running inside a browser do not have access to application menus. Another aspect is that often, the operations that you would need undo for is taken care of by the browser undo function. For instance when entering text in a email message in Gmail or other web based email software: If you type something that you shouldn't have, hit the browser undo and the text in that text box reverts to its previous state, courtesy of the browser's undo buffer, not the web app's. In other web app contexts, undo simply doesn't make sense for one reason or another.

As a result, it seems that undo has never really made it into the mainstream of web applications, regardless of whether it would be useful or not.

surveyCanvas, and any other web service for producing questionnaires, is a perfect example of a web app that really benefits from undo functionality. Here, the browser has no grasp of what is going on, conceptually speaking, as you build your questionnaire, so it cannot provide any sensible functionality for undo in such a context. So it is up to the web app.

But you have to build your questionnaire-building web app carefully for it to be able to provide undo. in SurveyCanvas, the questionnaire exists as a Javascript object on the client side and an xml structure server side. The XML structure server side is authoritative and is where the undo buffer is kept and synced back to the client side on undo.

So, while undo/redo is something that we'd like our customers to take for granted, we are still happy to have it nailed down in surveyCanvas in this version. Now you don't have to worry if you accidentally delete the wrong element, that one with the long list of answer alternatives of car dealerships in your area.

2. The insert and Edit menus behave differently in this version. Well, there wasn't any Edit menu prior to this version, only buttons that executed the various edit commands. We added several commands in this version, and what we found was that the Tools palette was becoming too cluttered again.

The obvious solution was to gather all the commands into a menu. Menus on the web are not really meant for executing commands like in an application menu, where the commands execute the instant you select something from the menu, but this is what we have done with both the Edit and the Insert menu in this version. We hope you like it! See the linked blog entry above for more info on this.

3. As for the Globals Options panel, we thought it was high time to give it a make-over. The new version takes up far less space in its default state, can be expanded and collapsed at will, and works the same or better, especially the colour wheel. By the way, we use Steven Wittens great Farbtastic jQuery library to provide the color wheel.

Other enhancements in this version:

• 'Duplicate' and 'Move to end' in the Edit menu in surveyCanvas. Together these make it easy to build new pages in your questionnaire based on existing ones.
• New option to toggle the Question Area autoscroll on/off in the Tools panel.
• Support for .csv files when importing participant data.
• Possibility for exporting your questionnaire as a Microsoft Word file. This feature is accessible in the window that opens when pressing "Print/Export" in the Tools panel of surveyCanvas.
• The Results and Result Graphs pages now show "wait" graphics while the results pages are being built instead of just showing a blank page.
• Better functionality to stop indexing bots opening a survey from an open link posted on the web and thereby counting as a participant.
• The Laguna Survey User's Manual has been updated to reflect the changes in version 2.1.

Bugs exterminated:

• Pressing an update button in survey admin would just grey it out if the current session was expired. Now the user is correctly logged off with an appropriate message.
• Fixed a situation where clicking any of the links in the 'Finish' page of a survey in Preview would open a Sonora IT webpage inside the Preview.
• Fixed 'no email provided' from showing up in the email input field in the Test panel resulting from using the open test link.
• A couple of localization errors were fixed.

Known issues:

• The colour wheel in surveyCanvas does not correctly update its view in some versions of the browser Opera. It does however update the colour correctly, and the technical functionality is not affected by this bug. We are investigating this issue.
• The Text box input in the Options panel does not scroll its contents correctly in the browser Opera in cases where there is a lot of text in the box. We are investigating this issue. The technical functionality is not affected by this bug.

Also, we've made some significant changes under the hood in this version, which will serve us well in taking Laguna Survey forward in the months and years to come. Stay tuned!

We are very happy to announce that Laguna Survey 2.0 has now gone live on our servers!

As always, the new version is served to all new and existing customers.

There are many new features in this version, but the three major ones are:

- We are converting our price model into one where we charge for answers instead of number of particpants added to a survey. At the same time we are setting up all new surveys that you create with 25 (updated to 75 as of v.2.1) free answers.

We think this is a big deal for our customers because there is now nothing to pay if you don't get what is important to you: answers to your surveys. And even then, you get 25 (75 as of v.2.1) free answers for every survey. And even if you get more, it is up to you if you want to pay for some or all of those answers.

- Laguna Survey now supports open surveys. All new and existing surveys now have an open link associated with them that you can spread or publish on the web. When the link is clicked, the survey is taken. At the same time, explicit particpants will continue to work as before, and you use both the open link and explicit participants in one survey.

- Speaking of participants, you can now add participants in several batches, both before and after the survey has started. This means you now longer have to duplicate a survey if you for example get hold on a few more email adresses to people you would like to have as participants in a survey you have started.

We would additionally like to tell you about our new Laguna Survey User's Manual, which you can download from http://www.lagunasurvey.com/documentation

The user's manual takes you through the whole process of setting up and starting a survey, and more, step by step. It is heavily illustrated with screen shots from Laguna Survey.

Other new features and enhancements in Laguna Survey 2.0 include:

- The questionnaire is now editable in surveyCanvas even after survey start. surveyCanvas opens the questionnaire in a limited editing mode after the survey has started. In this mode, you can edit the text and graphics elements and certain visual setting.

- surveyCanvas now has a 'Print...' button in the Tool pane, which enables the questionnaire to be printed with 'nice' formatting, i.e. one page of the questionnaire will result in one page of the printout, and the graphical header, if you have inserted one, will show on each page.

- You no longer choose whether participants should be anonymous or not when you add them. Instead, you choose at the last possible moment, right before you start a survey.

Some error situations have been corrected:

- More stringent file checking has been put in place to files added as images in surveyCanvas, and as participant data in the Participants panel.

- The order of the asynchronous calls made to fetch the answer quantity and population in the Results panel has been corrected so that all numbers and percentages are always correctly displayed.

- A number of minor localization errors have been addresses.

- A problem with copying the questions from one survey to another has been corrected

- Several browser-specific issues have been addressed.

We are actually pretty impressed with ourselves and happy about version 2.0, and we really hope you are, too. Why can't you take a enterprise type task, make an application for it and program it to the brim with pro features, wrap it in a consumer-like friendly interface and sell it with a price model that appeals to big and small players alike?

We couldn't come up with a good answer to that question either.

The above illustration shows the image element selected in surveyCanvas, with an image inserted. You can use the File tool in the Options pane to insert and re-insert different images, which will replace the image already placed. The image inserted will be scaled down to 800 pixels horizontally, if necessary.

- New element type: Link. You can now insert a web link in the survey wherever you want, choosing whether the link should open in a new window or use the existing window (thus jumping out of the survey).