Development of Surveyar, my new online app for making, distributing and analysing surveys, is coming along rather nicely!
At the moment I’m working away on the penultimate stage of development, analysis. (Accounting comes last in my book.)
At this stage, I’m happy to present you with a screenshot of what one particular analysis function of Surveyar will look like. I’ve decided to do this page quite off the cuff, as it’s a nice example of problem-solving design. Even though this page isn’t complete, the ideas of the design are in place and already work very well.
It’s the response preview page, and it essentially gives you a concise summary of all the data your survey has collected.
I’m keeping the detail of the screenshot to a minimum because even this page is not quite complete (as far as I am concerned; it functions perfectly, although it doesn’t meet my standard for design quite yet).
A few points of interest:
Minigraphs
Minigraphs are designed to let the user quickly see the implications of the data. Although minimal, they are labeled with axis, and each bar is titled with the first letter of whatever response the data implies. (That means, if you had to select one of the months, you would see “J | F | M | A | M | J | J….” along the bottom.) It’s larger than a sparkline, but smaller and less detailed than an all-out graph - it’s there to give a meaningul flavour, quickly.
Personally, I’m in love with the idea. I love graphs and statistics anyway, though (which is why I’m looking forward to the work to come).
Most recent / all (drilling down)
Most recent / all is my answer to the problem: “How do you summarise unique text responses?”
It’s a nice example of the power of JavaScript, coupled with the power of hiding things away from the user.
Initially the user is represented with the five most recent text responses that have been given, with a toggle link next to them which will display (and then hide) a list of all text responses.
It’s essentially drilling down on the responses, but I like it a lot here - it means I can have my cake and eat it. Detail and simplicity, separated by only one click.
One more to come
Within Surveyar (and perhaps the world of questions) there are three sorts of response you can get. Above I’ve covered text and choice responses.
What’s left is range responses - that is, responses confined to one of five on a defined scale. See the image to the right for an example for a grid of ranges in a Surveyar survey. (Whoops, that’s a completely different bit of the app… I think I’m showing too much!)
When you group these questions together into a grid, you can’t really use bar graphs to display the data effectively (or, I haven’t found that graph design quite yet 
).
So you need to adopt a different approach if you want to communicate, simply yet with detail, the data.
I wonder if any of you can guess what sort of method I’ll use? It doesn’t take an awful lot of imagination… in fact, I think it’s the most logical/natural method possible.
I’ll leave that last one open - at least then you have something to be surprised by when Surveyar launches
You can sign up to be notified of when Surveyar launches at Surveyar.com
Those who do sign up early in advance of the launch will get a nice bonus/gift when I get around to the unveiling… 
I have been curious about Surveyar and can’t wait to see how it works.