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Survey Tools -- why Wufoo please?
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I saw Paul's recent tweet about deciding to use Wufoo as his survey tool of choice.As a huge believer in embedded voice-of-visitor surveys, I'm very interested in the subject, but a bit out of date. What's the big advantage of Wufoo over the usual suspects like Survey Monkey & co, please?I can see that Wufoo looks to be a lot more flexible and can be used for lots of different things. But a visitor-feedback form is usually very simple. In fact the shorter and simpler the better if you want to get a representative volume of feedback. But are there ways in which Wufoo is better even at the basic stuff?Tim
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There were a couple of things that made we settle on Wufoo...
- It integrated well into Facebook which was a nice extra for me.
- I had a lot of control over the visual appearance of the form.
- It has a nice management system for conditional questions (e.g. if you answer yes to one question it then shows another question that would otherwise be hidden).
- It allows you to create visually appealing, customisable reports that can be embedded into the website (if you want to make them public).
- It provides a number of good embed features.
- I was always using it for other forms and like the fact that it is flexible enough to provide both forms and surveys.
- You can add page breaks at any point in the survey.
That said, I didn't review all of the options available so I cannot say it is better. It was just that Wufoo did what I wanted. -
We use Google Forms to create surveys – quick, easy and it provides a quick visual snapshot of the responses. Here's how http://bit.ly/rT7hn3
We've used Survey Monkey, Survey Gizmo and Good Gecko in the past (not yet tried WuFoo for this purpose) but found Google Forms easier for quick customer development and feedback surveys.
If you want more control over the design then it's maybe not the best solution out there.
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I love Wufoo also.
They have taken something complex and tedious and made it (dare I say it?!) actually enjoyable to create and manage forms. I only wish I'd found it sooner than I did.
The support is quick, friendly and knowledgeable, the blog constantly updated and with Chris Coyier on board they have a regular stream of updates to the platform based on what developers want.
Top of my wishlist for new improvements would be a 'mobile-ready' tick box where a user browsing to a form on a mobile handset would see a mobile optimised equivalent of the form.
Otherwise I love it.
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At the risk of sounding like one of Wufoo's sales guys (!) I would recommend taking out a free subscription and just having a play with it.
This is what I did and found that after 15 - 20 mins of playing around with it I was making forms without the need for any support documents, creating admin areas, rules etc.
It will either sell itself or put you off that quickly so best to just have a play I think.
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This is all really interesting stuff. Thank you for the detailed replies.I'm writing something about surveys at the moment, and it occurs to me that I could try creating a Wufoo one and embed it in my post as an example. I had been planning to just embed an existing Surveygizmo form. It seemed the obvious thing to do. But now that I think about it, there's no compelling reason to avoid having two surveys.And if another opportunity comes up, I'll try the Google Docs approach too.
