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by Nat Budin, Jul 07
- Last year, I redesigned the front page for surveys on Journey. Mostly, this was because survey takers had been having trouble finding the button to start the survey. Another reason was that I wanted to make sure survey takers with Journey accounts would be able to log in before taking the survey, so that if they felt like stopping halfway through, they'd be able to pick it up later on.
By and large, this new design was a success. I didn't hear any complaints about not being able to start the survey afterwards, and far more people started logging in. However, after the redesign, some users didn't realize that they didn't have to log in before taking the survey. Compounding this, some of them had difficulty signing up for an account.
To help with this, I've done a second redesign of the front page. I think this will make things a lot clearer. If you have any feedback, please do let me know. Thanks!
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by Nat Budin, Jun 27
- Today's update improves the usability of two existing features. First, the Annotation Field feature, which allowed you to write administrative notes on survey responses, has been changed to a more straightforward version: now, all responses automatically have a Notes field, which you can edit as you see fit. With this update, there's no need to add any special hidden fields to your survey to enable this.
Second, while it's always been possible to subscribe to survey responses using an RSS feed, this functionality was a bit hidden, particularly for users of Google Chrome and Internet Explorer, which don't automatically discover related RSS feeds for a page. With this update, I've added a "Subscribe" tab under Responses, which contains a basic overview of RSS and a copy-pasteable URL for the response feed.
In the next update, I'm planning a much-needed overhaul of the questionnaire editing UI. This update will make it possible to move questions between pages easily as well as making Journey much more usable on touch devices, such as the iPad.
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by Nat Budin, Dec 22
- Happy holidays, everyone! Here's your present: a major update for Journey. There are way too many new things to list here, but some of the highlights are:
- Dashboard: a new front page which lets you see your surveys, responses, and subscription info at a glance, including RSS feeds of what's new!
- Preview: take a look at a survey before filling it out.
- Private surveys: don't want your survey on the front page of Journey? Now you can opt out.
- Publishing: we've got 4 new ways to spread the word about your survey!
- Copy a survey: don't waste time recreating your old survey - just copy it and edit.
I'm really happy with the way this version turned out, and I hope you will be too. Please, leave your feedback and let me know what you think!
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by Nat Budin, Nov 02
- Coming in the next version of Journey...
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by Nat Budin, Oct 22
- I was planning on getting to feature requests for version 2.6.2, but some more bug reports came in, so I've been fixing those instead:
- CRITICAL: Editing the tags or welcome text on a survey in 2.6.1 would delete the survey. This was fixed within 24 hours of releasing 2.6.1 on the live site and only affected one user, but 2.6.2 is the first tagged release to include this fix.
- It's now possible to only give someone permission to view answers to a survey (rather than full editing privileges), and have the links show up for them correctly on the front page.
- Annotation fields will now show up for non-site admins.
- Answer RSS feeds will again work if you don't have a login cookie, using the feed's secret key. (This fixes Google Reader support.)
- The option to force users to log into Journey before taking a survey wasn't possible to select. It is now.
- Firefox 1 and 2 users should no longer see graphical weirdness when trying to fill out a survey.
In addition, there are a couple of minor feature additions:
- The front page UI for surveys has been revamped: it's now easier to find the link to start answering, and clearer what your options are. This will continue to be improved in 2.6.3 in conjunction with some of the feature additions.
- CSS stylesheets are now cached for faster page loading.
