This is the first of a biweekly update from the Online Surveys development team.
As we pivot from version 2 to version 3 of Jisc Online Surveys, we wanted to be able to more easily communicate our progress and plans with our users. So, every other Monday morning, we’ll tell you what we’ve been working on and what we are planning. We’ll also use this space to communicate project timelines and our roadmap.
The last two weeks
Over the last two weeks, the priorities for our developers were to release an expansion of our supported languages and to complete our new Answer Piping feature.
The expansion of our supported languages was deployed on Thursday 16 November with release 2.2.2. We’ve added French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish with this release, but we also created the structure to enable us to more easily add new languages in the future.
Our Answer Piping feature is now being tested and will be released soon. (See further down for a sneak peek.)
We also implemented some smaller changes last week to improve the usability of existing features. A key change to note is that we have reversed the default view of the survey list on your Dashboard. As a default, you will now see all surveys that you have permission to, instead of just surveys you own.
Happening in the next two weeks
Our priority is to make progress with our Image Upload feature. Upon release, this will allow users to upload images to display on their surveys.
We are also doing a good deal of planning. We are poring over all the feedback we have received from users via our Customer Success team and from user interviews conducted by our UX team, to help us prioritise and plan our next phase of development. We will then be able communicate our priorities via this bulletin.
Delivering key features: an update on timelines
In our last email update, we let you know that we intended to deliver three key features in the new version (v3), before we disabled the creation of new surveys in the older version (v2) to prepare users for its sunsetting.
As we are still in the process of delivering those features, we are pushing back our intended date for disabling new survey creation in v2. We will communicate that date in due course.
The key features and their delivery estimates are outlined below.
| Feature | Status | Delivery estimate |
|---|---|---|
| Language settings | Released | Released v2.2.2 |
| Answer piping | Testing | Days |
| Image upload | Developing | Weeks |
A sneak peak of Answer Piping
Answer Piping allows question text to include an answer the respondent has given to a previous question.
As we’re busy testing this feature, I thought it would be worth sharing how it works.
First of all you’ll need a source question: the question from which you want to take a respondent’s answer. There’s nothing special about how this question has been set up. It can be any type of question.
Secondly, you’ll need a target question: the question where you want the answer from the source question to appear.
You’ll need to put your cursor in the part of your question text where you want the answer from the source question to be placed. Typing two braces, or curly brackets, will open a menu to select your source question from a list of previous questions.
And that’s it! When your respondent completes the survey, their answer to the source question will be shown in the text of the target question exactly where you placed your curly brackets.
We’ve improved upon the Piping feature in the previous version of Online Surveys in a few key ways:
- We’ve removed the need to set an anchor in the source question, lessening the clicks and steps for the user to accomplish the task.
- We haven’t just replaced square brackets for curly brackets. Typing a pair of curly brackets in any question text field now prompts you to select from a list of valid source questions.
- You can now have a target question on the same page as your source question.
- We’ve added logic to hide a target question if the source question was not answered, so your respondents don’t see gibberish if they skipped it. (Of course, you can set your source question to required to make sure it is answered.)
Staying in touch
If you have any questions, you can contact our Customer Success team at help@jisc.ac.uk.