How Confirmit Flex Allows You to Reach Respondents Through New Channels

posted by: Nick Roman on 5/4/2010

Whatever type of survey program you utilize, it is important to get people to answer your surveys. If you are able to reach participants at the right time, and allow them to submit their answers through a channel that is convenient (and maybe even fun), chances are they will be more likely to respond.

One of the ambitions with Confirmit Flex, which came out of Beta with the launch of Confirmit Horizons in early March 2010, is to allow Confirmit, our customers, and partners to experiment with new channels for data collection in a way that is cost effective in terms of money, resources, and time.

Confirmit Flex offers a number of "extension points" or "hooks" that enable connecting external applications to extend the capabilities of Confirmit. With Confirmit 15 we released the first three of these extensions, developed and hosted by Confirmit. Watch the "Introducing Confirmit Flex" webinar for more on the thinking behind Confirmit Flex, and for demos of all the extensions released with version 15.

One of the extension points in Confirmit Flex is the "survey front-end" extension point, which essentially offers an API (Application Programming Interface) to the Confirmit Survey Engine. The iPhone Survey add-on, which came out of Beta with the release of Confirmit 15, is using this extension point to provide a rendering that is more suitable for the iPhone touch screen than traditional HTML with tiny radio buttons. The survey is automatically presented with the following rendering when opened on an iPhone or iPod touch.

The way this works, is that the Confirmit Survey Engine can deliver a survey page, as well structured XML or JSON, as an alternative to presenting the page in HTML. This is done page by page: an XML or JSON representation of the page; including details about all questions on the page with variable names, question type, question texts, answer lists, and other settings; is sent to an extension. The extension can then create an alternative rendering of that page, present it to the respondent, and submit the responses back to the Survey Engine.

One of the key benefits of this model is that when creating the extension, developers only have to focus on how the different question types and properties should be rendered and presented. They do not have to store anything, or run any survey logic, because all of that is handled by the same survey engine that creates the standard HTML pages. Because of this, development time to present the survey in an alternative channel or rendering is significantly reduced, and a prototype of a new channel can be created in a few hours. This allows Confirmit, customers, and partners to experiment at low cost.

Since this is running on top of the same survey engine as the other, more traditional modes (telephone, personal interviewing/kiosk and Web), the survey only has to be set up once. The respondents’ answers will be validated in the normal way regardless of channel, and if validation fails, the same page will be presented again, with an error message. All standard survey logic will be executed.

The survey can be changed and updated instantly without having to change anything on the extension side. Finally, data is stored in a common database regardless of channel and is available in real-time for reporting.

I've already mentioned iPhone surveys. We will soon also provide SMS surveying on this platform, so watch this space. Another example of what the survey front-end extension point could be used for is presenting surveys in Flash or Silverlight, instead of HTML.

Confirmit Flex makes it much simpler to experiment with new survey applications. One of our developers spent just a few hours coming up with a prototype of surveying on Windows Messenger, and through the survey front-end extension point. Take a look at the demo.

I am very interested in your ideas on other data collection channels that could be built on top of Confirmit in this manner. Share your ideas using the comment field below, or contact me on Twitter.