Poll Your Audience the Right Way With PopSurvey

Online surveys are a drag. Usually, they’re just a series of questions on a drab-looking page that are no fun to answer, and they make you wish you hadn’t agreed to fill out the survey in the first place. That’s probably why market researchers, advertising firms, online stores, and corporations worry about completion rates – if a participant doesn’t finish a survey, the data gathered is often of little or no use for their analysis. So what are your options? You can either spend a lot of time and money building a well-designed survey from scratch, or you can try PopSurvey.

PopSurvey helps you create beautiful surveys that people will want to complete. The app makes it easy to build surveys, analyze results and promote your surveys. It’s currently available with a number of plans to suit your needs, including a free one and is great for getting started with conducting surveys. But will PopSurvey meet your requirements? Let’s test-drive it to find out.

Overview

PopSurvey offers a simple way to create surveys that look great. The idea is to display surveys not in a form but in a survey player interface, displaying one question at a time for increased readability. The survey creation and results interfaces are well-designed and easy for even first-time users to get the hang of. You can customize the look of your survey with background images and a company logo, add as many questions as you need, and even choose from a number of available templates to hit the ground running. Surveys can be sent out via a link, or shared on social networks. The lack of a few power features may keep large enterprises from adopting PopSurvey, but it still has a lot to offer smaller teams and user needs.

Getting started

You can choose to sign up for a free plan to try the service with 2 surveys and single-user access, then at any time upgrade your plan to include unlimited users and survey responses, custom Thank You slides and premium background images. Once you’ve signed up, you’re greeted by a dashboard from which you can create a new survey from scratch or select a template with preset questions that you can edit. These range from customer feedback and service cancellation forms to conference and speaker feedback surveys to workplace improvement questionnaires.

Creating a survey

The well-designed survey creation page is laid out a bit like Microsoft’s presentation software, Powerpoint. There are slide thumbnails on the left, a slide editing window in the middle of the screen, and editable parameters to the right. Questions are displayed in a media player-style window one by one instead of all on a single page. Each survey consists of a title slide, question slides and a Thank You slide. Your uploaded logo will show up on the first and last slides.

You can modify the design of the survey in the Survey Design tab, located in the editing pane on the right – upload a background image or choose from PopSurvey’s selection, or just have a color that you can set. The Question Settings tab allows you to edit question text and answer options for each question. You can also add, duplicate, and delete questions from the buttons at the bottom of the pane.

Adding questions

There are five kinds of slides to choose from that you can create questions with:

1. Multiple choice – allow users to select a single or multiple answers
2. Rating scale – choose between 3-, 5- and 10-point scales
3. Form – great for collecting details like names and email addresses
4. Comments/feedback – this provides a large text field; you can choose to restrict the number of characters if you need to
5. Instructions – useful if you need to explain terms, conditions, or points for respondents to keep in mind while taking your survey

Keep in mind that PopSurvey doesn’t currently allow for skip logic (where a user who has entered a particular answer on one question can skip the next question if it doesn’t apply to him/her), requiring mandatory responses on questions, randomization or other such question-related features present on apps like SurveyMonkey. It would be nice to see these options added in the future.

Getting responses

Once your survey is ready, you can promote it by sending out a shortlink via an email of your own or share it on Facebook and Twitter. Other survey apps allow for sending out invites via a controlled contact list so you can keep track of who’s completed your survey and who hasn’t, and remind the latter to do so with a follow-up message, but here you’ll need to do the communications work yourself. When people choose to respond to your survey, they’ll be able to take one of the best-looking surveys they’ve ever seen – PopSurvey’s player style presentation is much easier on the eyes than most other surveys out there. Users can also move back and forth between questions to change responses if need be. I took a few surveys myself and got through them quickly and painlessly. Take my The Office-themed sample survey here.

Once users have responded to your survey, you can click on the Responses link next to the name of your survey in the dashboard to see them and download a CSV copy as well. The responses are well laid-out and easy to read but might become to difficult to manage without additional statistics and visualization tools if you’ve a large number of respondents. I also found the responses to be fairly buggy – there were sometimes more responses (with blank fields) than I tested with and the CSV file would have differently formatted content than the Responses page. Bugs like these need to fixed before marketing this to serious users as one simply can’t work with loopy results.

Conclusion

PopSurvey has a lot going for it – it’s possibly the most up-to-date of all the survey apps out there. However, it doesn’t have certain advanced features which I’ve found myself missing even for small groups. It’s a great tool for the price though, and I wish more surveys adopted some of the design principles applied by PopSurvey to help ease the process for respondents. It’s also very easy to use and work with. If you’ve been looking for a quick and easy way to make stylish surveys, and can live with it’s more focused feature-set, it might be the perfect app for you.