

Ask HN: Building a survey/questionnaire engine - wilsonfiifi

Hi everyone,<p>I was wondering if any of you have experience building survey&#x2F;questionnaire engines and if so can you give me a few pointers such as links to papers, books, articles so i can educate myself?<p>Thanks a bunch.
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davismwfl
I have built 3 going back to the late 1990's, 2 of them were for direct
marketing companies, one was for an inbound call center. I don't have any
links to share that would help you in the terms of building a survey engine,
sorry, but I will share a couple of things.

A good survey engine is way more complex than most people realize. On the
surface, survey engines seem pretty easy, ask a few questions and store the
responses. But when you get into it, there are a lot of details, like
branching strategies, rules, formatting, question types and a ton of other
things to consider. For my company now, we actually just utilize survey monkey
(white labeled), because it saved us a ton of time and headaches of managing
survey's and building reports. In the end when we built them in the past, I'd
say the reporting and analytics is equally as difficult as building the
engine.

