

Show HN: Survey Builder with Drag/Drop Logic Branching - martinaglv
http://visimojo.com/survey/builder

======
nathanbarry
Wow, this looks really good. I've spent some time designing UIs to solve the
same problem, and you've done a better job than I did.

I just have a couple thoughts:

1\. Give the demo by pointing out things in the actual application. Psuedo UIs
or presentations aren't nearly as effective.

2\. Allow me to use the scroll function (in both directions, like on a
trackpad or magic mouse) to move around the interface. At first I thought it
was broken before I realized I needed to click and drag.

3\. When dragging a question to reorder, change it so that you are dragging
the actual question, not a copy of the question. Leave a dashed border around
where the question was.

I often find it helpful to highlight the drop-able areas as well, but this may
not make sense for this use case.

4\. Make the Settings and Delete icons on the questions more clear. Since they
are hidden in the bubbles it is hard to tell what the icon actually is. Be
clear first, clever second. If one of those has to go, get rid of clever.
(paraphrasing Jason Fried)

Very nicely done. Keep iterating and you'll have a great product.

~~~
martinaglv
Amazing advice! Thank you very much.

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flyosity
Very cool, I built something similar for a marketing application called Bronto
a few years back. Here's a screenshot:

<http://cl.ly/LMn2>

Same kind of in-out flow but for marketing, sending emails, segmenting
contacts, etc. The fun part was drawing the bezier curves using canvas between
each node!

~~~
martinaglv
This looks very good! I took the decision of fixing everything to a grid early
on and still pay the price for it (I have yet to make connections overlap
properly). Having everything floating free on the stage is probably a better
approach.

~~~
chimi
<http://jsplumb.org/jquery/demo.html> is a library to make all the connecting
easier. I've used it. It's pretty nice.

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columbo
I have some experience in this area, here is my wishlist that I haven't seen
yet in dynamic survey/assessment builders:

1 - Form Item labeling. I can't say "First Name" = 'firstName' in wufoo,
instead it gives it an arbitrary id of form_1_154. This is BS and means I have
to create a mapping table.

2 - Embed on site. Give the ability to embed the form as-is on an existing
website without having to rely on an iframe or other such hacks.

3 - API. API. API. Allow the creation, deletion, edit, export, and import of
form information.

4 - Internationalization. Allow me to translate my text in X languages.

5 - Reporting. This is where wufoo really has a good setup.

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ayanb
I love the 'Story' Page. Honest, passionate, ballsy. Hold on to the fire,
dude!

"Visimojo is developed by Martin Angelov, a 23 year old developer / designer
from Bulgaria. What makes this project interesting is that it shows how a kid
from the farthest corners of Europe can build a service that can teach the
incumbents in a $7 billion industry a thing or two about interface design."

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mrcrassic
My screen's resolution is 1200x1920, which is, apparently, not big enough to
run this...?

~~~
martinaglv
Oops, didn't occur to me that somebody would have their screen in portrait.
Will fix it in a moment.

I do think that there should be a minimum resolution set as the application is
unusable on small screens. Any suggestions on how to handle it gracefully
would be greatly appreciated.

~~~
sophacles
In all honesty, the size requirement is terrible. I took one look at the page
saying I need a bigger window and hit ctrl-w and thought: "well maybe that was
a cool page, the headline sounded good. Oh well". I'm not against resizing my
windows, it's just that with nothing but a headline to go on, I'll just move
on to the next thing. Even if you don't show me the app, but instad a splash
page and some screenshots that keep my interest, with an explanation of _why_
I need to resize, I'll probably think, "Oh ok, and it's new, cut them some
slack" and resize away.

~~~
FuzzyDunlop
Agreed. That screen was my first impression, which hasn't made me at all
curious enough to faff about with my browser to make it display properly.
Since I use OS X, I have no reason to run my browser maximised.

Also, the mere presence of such a 'feature' just makes me think that the
design wasn't thought through well enough. I actually don't know, because
again there's no effort made to convince me otherwise.

------
martinaglv
I am the creator of Visimojo and I will be happy to answer your questions. The
app is still in beta and my todo list is rather long, but I decided to release
it publicly and collect some feedback.

~~~
TobbenTM
This could be improved if you do not already have it on the todo:
<http://imgur.com/a/9o1bA>

All I did was move the box. The connections remain the same. The "No"
connection should be distinguished from the "Yes" and default connection.

~~~
martinaglv
Thank you for the suggestion! The connections need a lot of improvement. I
will experiment with different colors to make them easier to distinguish.

~~~
Papirola
try playing with the transparency on hover

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WesleyJohnson
I worked for a mystery shopping company for about 4 years and we relied
heavily on surveys. There are some of the things we ran into with our "system"
that I thought I'd share.

1\. It would nice to have more advanced logic. For example, if I had a matrix
question ranking my like or dislike of an array of sports, it would be nice to
allow control flow so that I could ask follow up questions on sports I didn't
like. You could do that now with separate questions for each sport (Do you
like basketball? Yes/ No -> Explain), but if you rated them in a matrix there
is really no way to do that as far as I can tell.

2\. Using previous answers as variables of following questions. (What did you
order for lunch? Sub/Pizza) -> (Did your find your %answer% to your liking)?
You could accomplish this by having the Sub answer follow one path and the
Pizza answer follow another path. But that would create separate questions for
reporting when really you just wanted to know if they enjoyed their order, but
you'd like to personalize the question based on their own answers.

3\. Another logic example might be that regardless of an answer on question A,
you'll go to question B, but question B might have some of it's options
disabled based on the answer to question A. Again, your system could handle
this by branching each answer on question A to it's own path with a modified
version of question B only showing the relevant options, but I would again
assume that this would create separate question B's in reporting when you
might not want that.

I do realize these are edge cases and someone needing this functionality might
not be your target audience. Just thought I'd share.

Great, great job so far. As others have said, it looks really good and I found
it really intuitive.

~~~
HelloMcFly
SurveyAnalytics does all of the things you mentioned above, and I feel like
Qualtrics does as well. Not that every system isn't limited in someway though.
For examples, I've not seen anywhere that can branch based on a ranking
question, which would have been great for me there for awhile.

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vlokshin
This is really great. I love how you did the google docs demo as the starter
modal.

Looks like a great product, but I think most of the people building these
would be less technical. I saw "rick click to delete" while on mac/chrome,
there's no mouse play built in.

Maybe consider simplifying the initial screen to just one block and a "do this
next" message so that the user can try it? At least for lesser tech users, if
you can define where they're coming from (or more often).

ex: split facbeook / twitter / HN traffic in and make assumptions as to what
kind of users are coming from where.

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GFischer
I wanted to try it, but it's not answering at the moment.

I've used Google Consumer Surveys and Survata (highly recommended :)
<http://survata.com/> ) recently, and I didn't feel constrained by the survey
choices. Did you detect a market need for this?

------
ianpri
Really nice an intuitive, the only thing I couldn't seem to do is assign
multiple flags to one answer?

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arikrak
Nice. I think you should try to make it more space-efficient so people can
view it on smaller screens. The boxes can be packed closer together, even if
you keep a fixed grid.

I wonder if you could also let it serve as a Wizard for people basides just a
questionnaire. So it would suggest results based on a user's choices. (That
could include links, but I don't it should automatically re-direct to the
page.)

Depending on how simple you want to keep it, it might make sense to add a more
advanced logic than just checking one boolean. For example, maybe let a later
box depend on which specific choice was chosen earlier.

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justhw
Awesome. Put a notice notifying we need to click and drag the board to move
around. By default we tend to use our mouse scrolls. You can simplly put a css
`cursor:move` property on the dragable area to let us know its dragable.

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robflynn
This is great. I'm building something exactly like this for internal company
usage. We have a few different parts of the site that involve surveys (though
I called them dynamic wizards). We occasionally need to tweak the flow so I
have versioning capability added.

I initially started with a DSL that would generate everything for me but I
decided a UI would be nicer.

Great job. Ours will never be available for public consumption and has to be
tightly integrated into our site so it'll never see any kind of third party
usage, but it's nice to see someone else doing it too!

------
AlexanderZ
Remove the "Next" button when it's not necessary (when there can be only one
answer to the question). Just go to the next question when a user clicks on an
answer to the current question.

~~~
martinaglv
Sounds reasonable, but one issue is what to do if the person chose an answer
by mistake. Will I then have to show a back button on the next question?

~~~
AlexanderZ
Yeah, I think a back button will be a good solution.

I'd prefer to click a few times to fix a mistake then have to click twice for
every answer.

------
agnokapathetic
Although the market is substantially smaller, this would be really cool to
mash-up with Twilio to create Interactive Voice Response menus (Press 1 to get
your account balance, Press 2 to speak to a representative, etc).

You could also allow users to select Text-to-speech or integrate eLance or
<http://www.voices.com/> and sell human voice-overs.

------
krmmalik
Not trying to be facetious but doesn't Poll Daddy solve the branching issue
now? How does your product compare to something like Poll Daddy for the like
to like features? Is it as easy to share/embed and view reports etc?

What I'm really looking for is a surveying solution that helps me conduct
Relative Importance Testing. I haven't seen that anywhere out in the market.

------
sathishmanohar
Wow! I've imagined about his kind of polling product. Two thumbs up for making
this possible.

I have a suggestion along the lines of what nathanbarry suggested, I thought
using scroll to zoom in and zoom out, and having collapsible (tree structure
like) questions will make it easy for users to create long polls.

All the best :)

------
propercoil
"Visimojo works best on screens that are at least 1280x720. Maximize the
window to enjoy it fully." my resolution is higher

~~~
scottmagdalein
Sad for my 11-inch MacBook Air.

------
SanjayUttam
This is really great work.

Slightly off-topic; there have been a ton of great submissions "Show HN" posts
lately. I find myself signing up for most of them just because I either think
they are useful right now or will be very shortly. This is no exception. Keep
up the great work all.

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tomasz_l
Like it - but price is putting ME off. Would you consider per survey, instead
of per month, pricing plan?

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shutton
Looks really nice, like the idea of visually laying out the survey, I guess
this is what people do with pen and paper anyway. Some way of customizing the
style of the survey would be useful for embedding on your own site.

~~~
hussfelt
Agree with the above, why not have a customisable CSS sheet later? This is
what we're doing at our startup, and it empowers developers to create some
awesome stuff!

------
arthurquerou
Amazing service, the only thing missing (and that would stop me from using it)
is the ability to check the Free Text input with a regexp (to be sure that the
user input is a valid email, phone number etc...)

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drumdance
Very nice! I'm curious how well it scales for long surveys. I used to work at
SurveyGizmo and some of their customers would build epically long surveys,
sometimes dozens of pages.

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hussfelt
2 more things: Autosave would be awesome!

Missing scrolling with the mouse, now I need to drag to scroll... Scrolling
with the trackpad on a Mac would be so neat!

~~~
hussfelt
Yet another future feature request, probably already on the todolist: Password
protection on Surveys.

Keep up the good work!

~~~
martinaglv
Will do! Thank you for the suggestions :)

------
dokuniev
Check out another good project that is trying to re-invent the survey/form
space <http://www.typeform.com>

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davidbrent
I find it awesome that your survey tool functions very well, but also that it
is performing so well under the load of HN #1 thread. Nice work!

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oftenwrong
For the sake of accessibility, I suggest adding the necessary functionality to
allow users to zoom in using their browser (C-+ or C-=).

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tucson
Is there a way to ask an open question (no list of predefined answers, but a
text box for the user's answer) ? I cannot find it.

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thisone
quite interesting, I'll have to take a closer look at what you've done.

My employment for the past 6 months has been on a wide and deep dataset
collection tool, one that takes in arbitrary questions that can have both
validation rules and workflow rules applied.

Getting the tooling designs correct and usable seems to be the hardest part.

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septerr
Looks great, don't have time to go through it in detail right now, but first
impression - the ui and idea are awesome.

------
chrishenn
Are you using jsPlumb? I just spent some time on a project that uses jsPlumb
for a similar effect.

