Two Birds

Building a survey can be as complicated as you need it to be, but often you just need a quick an dirty solution. Google Docs to the rescue.

If you are doing any sort of market research or customer satisfaction study, you invariably need to conduct some sort of quantitative survey to provide you with measured data to drive decisions. For larger more complicated surveys, you really need to use Survs, a new player on the scene expecting to come out of beta this fall.

Survs provides the usual “build a survey” functionality that you find in the other applications, but where Survs stands out is in its beauty and sharing features. Building the survey is a snap, sharing the results with others couldn’t be easier. For anyone doing any serious amount of measurement, you can create channels to segment your respondents for later filtering etc. It’s still in beta and while it misses some features that the hardcore surveyor will notice it is very stable and more than enough for the hobbyist.

Little info, little time

Sometimes though you just need a small amount of info from a small amount of people and you don’t really care about all those extra features. Email might be fine for asking 1 or 2 people, but if you have to ask a group, keeping track of the replies can be a bit of a pain. Google Docs to the rescue!

You can create simple “surveys” in Google Docs very quickly and easily and best of all, for free.

1. First, fire up Google Docs (you will need a Google account if you don’t already have one). We’ll be creating a new Form.
   
2. Then start filling in the types of questions you want to ask. For my example I want to know people’s food preferences prior to a larger dinner party that I am hosting. You can add additional questions by clicking the Add Item button.
   
3. Once you are done, make sure the form is saved. Now you can send it to people and have them fill it out for you. We can do this a couple of ways, either via email, or by sending the URL to people. To email your friends just click the Email this form button at the top and enter some email addresses. To send the URL to people just copy the URL at the bottom of the form.
   
4. How do you see the results? Go back to you Google Docs page and you can find your new form in the Spreadsheets section of the Items by type panel on the left. The default is to display documents with the newest documents at the top, so your new form/spreadsheet should be at the top.
   
5. All the results from the form are stored as rows in the spreadsheet. This is handy because you can do some cool things like exporting, doing some statistics with spreadsheet formulas, etc. The form also provides you with a decent summary of the responses. Click on Form → Show summary and you will get a few graphs of your response data.
   

Painless and quick

So building a little survey like this is pretty easy, cheap (free), and quick if you need to get some responses from a group of people. Perfect to see what people want to eat at your next dinner party, or which location people prefer to have your next gathering at. But, again, if you need to do some proper analysis and segmentation you really need to use something like Survs which offers much more control.

Screencast

See a quick screen cast I created breifly explaining how to create a quick survey in Google Docs.

Thanks for reading.