Tools for Online Research

[Ray Poynter]

Tell us all about the tools you find useful for online research, but posting a reply.

[Stephen Cribbett]

Dub are launching a new (qualitative) research and innovation community platform and Community Management service very soon. If anyone wants to know more or have a demonstration, they can get me at [e-mail]

[Alok Jain]

Does anyone use the tools like SurveyGizmo, Zoomerang, QuestionPro, Wufoo.. and if so what's been the experience?

[Dan Rockwell]

Zoomerang is decent, they have some nice reporting/filtering solutions + web panel to pass your survey on to a demographic sample.

Wufoo is a bit tricky at first. No recruiting, so you'll need to find your people. They did just add incentives via paypal and amazon rewards I believe. Decent reporting, not as extensive as Zoomerang. Wufoo is more 2.0-ish in building surveys, exporting them as stand alone URLs or widget code you can plug into any website.

Google surveys tied into Google docs isn't a bad choice either.

[Ian Davidson]

Google has a survey tool? Aaarrgghh. Abandon ship now!!

[Ian Davidson]

We use Nebu, GlobalPark, a proprietary flash survey tool called NexGenMR.
Nebu - really good all round, industrial strength scripting, sampling and reasonable panel management. Bit weak on live reporting.
GlobalPark - looks pretty, reasonable on panel management, fine for simple surveys, but too many clicks required for scripting anything complicated.
NexGenMR - very accomplished tool for Flash surveys and very good at generating richer data - but more time consuming to programme.
Have also used Zoomerang, SurveyMonkey, Confirmit and Snap in my time. Rather like Snap still actually - it's so easy to script in!
When not doing quant I like Google trends, Blogpulse and some of the other blog tracking tools.

[Dan Rockwell]

The google surveys is very basic though surprising alot like wufoo's form builder.

While its not "research" per say, I've always liked Youniverse (imagini's) approach to building an online persona out of someone. Try it out.

http://youniverse.com/

[Simon Kendrick]

It's for analysis rather than research, but I love using http://www.mindmeister.com/ for mindmaps

The only online survey tool I've used (aside from poll daddy) is Snap. It is fairly limited in what it can do, but it is perfectly fine for basic online surveys

[ResearchTalk]

Ray,

Although I don't have any live surveys I have set up Lime Survey (http://www.researchtalk.co.uk/survey/) without issue and I don't recall it taking very long. If I can do it you'll definitely manage :)

[Paul Alford]

I'm huge fan of Limesurvey and I'm currently alpha testing version 2. When that launches expect to see a really superb product. I think it will knock the socks off pretty much anything else in its class. It's a complete rewrite and will have masses of new functionality but with ease of use as a primary consideration. The new interface is very smooth and looks great.

[Mekki]

I can support the responses from other people about LimeSurvey. It seems to be where it's at for easy deployment of web questionnaires. I'm using it in my current research, and it was incredibly easy to set up, and even provides some built in statistical analysis, export to SPSS, and easy backup/restore features, along with powerful questionnaire logic features.

If you want to see a live demo of LimeSurvey in action, and help me out in my research at the same time, you can fill out the questionnaire here:

http://survey.mektek.ca