They grow up so fast.
Beetrieve, in its pre-3.0 life, was a great app, functionality-wise. It was just not sleek. Like a teenager, it was eager and had great ideas, but looked a little... unproportional.
All that's changed now.
Enter Beetrieve 3.0. We've completely ripped the old look to pieces, gone over every pixel, placement and alignment and rewritten its design from the ground up. The fundamental layout is still the same, because it always worked great, but instead of a fixed size window, awkwardly boxed inside your browser window, the browser window now is the app window. Every element floats to position itself effortlessly within this window, whatever size it is (click on the images to embiggen).
This is more than an improvement in looks: The new layout yields more room to the participants list, the invitation email body text box, and so on. It is in fact a really big deal, and it means you can decide how much you want to see of the admin interface. This new layout even works better in sizes smaller than the previous boxed window.
Furthermore, we've gone over every interface element and added definition, clarity and just plain niceties in countless places: All admin panels, the survey list, the web shop, the users list in Beetrieve Enterprise, the Account panel, surveyCanvas, etc, etc.
But, if you think Beetrieve 3.0 is all about layout and pixels, you'd be mistaken. The other big news in Beetrieve 3.0 is the new Participants Panel.
When you work with email participants you'd like as much info about them as possible, and you'd like to be able to work on them, like resend an invitation, disable any that don't want to participate, and so on. You could get and do quite a bit of that in the Participants Panel before, but in Beetrieve 3.0 we have just cranked it up so much more.
This is from a real life Beetrieve 3.0 survey. After survey start, each participant gets a small status square in front of their email address. You can see what the half-green mean from the illustration (you see these tooltips when you hover over), and from that you can infer what the solid green mean: The participant has filled out the whole questionnaire.
White with green border: Email has been delivered, but participant has not opened the questionnaire yet. Red? You guessed it: Email delivery failed. Grey means the email is currently in queue for sending. Orange/yellow? You've disabled the participant.
All the squares are clickable. Clicking on a square with any green disables the participant. Clicking on a red one tries to send the email again (you can try sending to all failed at once with a command in the menu). And of course, clicking on a yellow square re-enables that participant. Pretty neat!
But that's (of course) not all. You've already spotted the 'More…' buttons next to each square. Here's what that does, for a failed email:
You get the email address, editable, and the exact error message that the email system generated. Now you can easily determine why the message failed and correct the situation, if possible. Just hit 'Try again' when done, and the email will be sent again.Also, and that is there for all participants, you get that participant's link to the questionnaire (unless the survey has been started as anonymous, in which case the status squares also just show either sent or error). The link is a Beetrieve Enterprise only feature.
The improvements in the Participants Panel adds a whole new level of power for those that take their surveys seriously.
And seriously, with Beetrieve, we want to make creating surveys fun for people who take surveys seriously.
So what happens when someone opens and fills in the questionnaire when you have the Participants Panel open?
That's the other other big news in Beetrieve 3.0: We've removed every 'Update Status' button!
The whole web app is now just simply live, and updates automatically. Such an obvious thing really. It works great, and there is something incredibly satisfying about just sitting there watching as those little squares turn from white, green-bordered, to half green, to solid green, one by one, as the answers tick in. Of course, if you are more into numbers than colors, you can always switch to the Results Panel and watch the number of started and completed answers counting up in the same way.
Other new features? A few - the one to mention here would be the new and very handy survey info box accessible by clicking the cleverly named 'Show info' button above the survey list. Use it to add your own notes to any survey, for reference. These will then also show in the Survey Report. You can change a survey's name in the info box, as well.
See more screenshots, a few demo videos and more at Beetrieve.com.
So, can Beetrieve make it fun to create and run surveys? You tell us. Sign up and give it a try, then sound off in the comments, to customer (at) sonorait.com or use our contact form.