Review of ObjectPlanet’s Opinio 5
Opinio 5 is a well-designed, easy to use and highly customizable internet survey system published by Oslo, Norway based ObjectPlanet. The software, which is available both as a hosted service and as an application you can install on your own web server, offers all of the major features you would expect to find in a moderately advanced packaged with a few very powerful and interesting extras (and a couple of notable deficits). It is perfect for a corporate research department or organization with users at several levels — novice will find it fairly easy to create smart looking surveys very quickly, while more advanced users will be able to control precisely how the surveys look and feel. Opinio also offers a highly configurable reporting engine that for some applications may completely replace the need to examine the results in an outside data analysis package. The software is well priced, extensible, and is definitely worthy of consideration for any midsized research department looking for a flexible, easy to manage internet survey package.
Survey Capabilities
Opinio offers the usual variety of question types, included single/multiple choice questions, drop-down boxes, open-ended questions, essay questions and rating questions. A very flexible "matrix" type question is also available, which allows you to place multiple questions on a line (you might use this, for example, if you wanted to ask customers to rate an attribute and rate the importance of the attribute on the same line).
One neat feature is the ability to include a free text comment below any question you choose. You can also add text both before and/or after questions.
Opinio allows you to include images in questions, and will even let you use images as answer responses (respondents can click the image that represents their response). Opinio does not support ranking questions.
Every question type has its own unique set of validating capabilities (for example, you can say that you want to require respondents to select a minimum of two options, and a maximum of three items, or you can require than an open-ended question be entered as an e-mail address). Opinio makes it easy to include your own custom validation message.
Opinio supports question branching but it doesn’t support answer "piping" or repeating questions. The branching capability is actually quite powerful although in my opinion it is somewhat complicated to implement compared to how some other packages do it.
Opinio does not allow you to pre-populate answers to questions, although it does allow you to rotate the order of the answer choices in a multiple choice question (personally, I prefer to be able to randomize them).
Survey Development
Opinio has a very attractive and functional interface. It also offers lots of configuration options, both for your surveys and for your questions. Based on my experience, web-based systems that allow for a lot of configuration options tend to be somewhat slow and hard to use. Opinio is the exception. Despite the fact that the system lets you control everything about how your survey looks and acts, Opinio does a fairly good job of minimizing the need for lots of postbacks and screen refreshes through the use of smart design and what appears to be a fair helping of JavaScript.
Opinio’s main survey management screen
Opinio does not come with a bunch of pre-written surveys (at least, they weren’t available to my demo account and I didn’t see them mentioned anywhere). I assume that because the package is fairly advanced they’re assuming that most users will want to create their own surveys from scratch?
The implementation of the open-ended/essay question provides an interesting illustration of the flexibility of Opinio. You can insert text and numeric fields anywhere — including in the middle of blocks of text. And remember: you can use just about any validation scheme you can think of to ensure that respondents insert the type of data you want:
Questions can be inserted in the middle of text.
Part of the control that you get through Opinio’s survey development system comes through the ability to insert HTML whenever and where ever you please. This means that if you want to control the colors, size and look of your fonts it helps to know a certain amount of HTML. And because you can insert HTML any where you choose, it is fairly easy to embed graphics, sounds, animation and videos.
In terms of developmental flow, Opinio makes survey creation relatively quick and painless. It accomplishes this by including all of the most-likely-to-use option for each question on the same page as question you are creating. It also does everything possible to simplify navigation between questions. I did find that it took me a little time to get used to moving about from question without accidentally ending up at the main survey configuration screen, but after I got used to it I didn’t have a problem.
Opinio Question Designer
Rearranging questions in your survey can be kind of a pain. As you develop your survey, all of the questions are displayed in a form that makes it relatively easy to view what your survey is going to look like (which is nice). However, to move questions around you have to use little up/down arrows. If you want to move a question from the top of your twenty question survey to the bottom you need to click the down arrow twenty times (refresh, refresh, refresh, refresh, etc).
In terms of design/organization, Opinio includes a neat feature that allows you group questions into sections. Each section can have its own title, page, and background color and you can even randomize questions within each section.
Opinio does allow you to control much of the look and feel of your surveys through CSS style sheets and templates. CSS style sheets will be of particular use to companies and users who want all of their surveys to look a particular way — once you figure out how to properly set up your own CSS file all you’ll have to do is select it whenever you create a survey and you’ll be good to go.
Templates work differently from the templates you find in other survey systems (where by "template" they really mean "’pre-designed survey". A template in Opinio allows you to set the shell for your survey — basically, so you can embed your survey in the middle of a web page on your site. In other words, all of the navigation that you would find on your regular web site will be available from the survey. Pretty cool, but as far as I can figure, somewhat complicated to set up the first time.
Opinio gives you absolute control over all of the text that appears on your web site — not just questions and the answers, but also all of the buttons and system messages. These can each be customized on a survey to survey basis. Opinio also allows you to create and include a header and footer for each page (you can even save a bunch of headers and footers and reuse them from survey to survey). In fact, Opinio includes an option that allows you to view and edit all of the text used in your survey on one page, making it relatively easy to proofread and edit all of your words without having to navigate the survey question by question.
Opinio offers one of the most integrated systems for dealing with multiple language surveys that I’ve seen. With just a few clicks, you can set up the survey in any language you want, and then have the system send a special link to your translator who merely needs to follow prompts to enter each translated bit of text directly into Opinio. Even the administrative interface can be translated into multiple languages (all character sets are supported) so Opinio might be a good option if your native language is something other than English.
Opinio offers extensive question organization/management features including a library that makes it very easy to save and reuse your favorite questions from survey to survey. The program also offers a unique XML import/export feature that allows you to save questions and entire surveys in an XML format that can then be easily imported into other surveys or even other installations of Opinio.
One more item worthy of note — once responses have been collected it is impossible to edit/adjust the survey without deleting all of the data that has been collected so far. This is a surprisingly inflexible limitation — from my own experience, there have been numerous times when I have needed to go back to a survey to make changes
User Experience
Although Opinio does not offer a progress bar, it does allow you to include a "previous page" button and you have the option of letting your users finish their surveys later after they’ve already started — in fact, one especially thoughtful feature is that Opinio will e-mail the respondent with a link that they can use to get back to the survey.
Opinio makes it easy to embed your survey in a web site
One of the features that makes Opinio unique is the ability to embed "polls" into your web site and then automatically, immediately display the results to the respondent. While I couldn’t imagine buying Opinio based on this functionality (there are a lot of software packages that do this type of thing for much less money and complexity) it might be an interesting extra feature for someone who already owns the package and has a bunch of extra responses to use up.
Response Management
Opinio allows you to set start and stop dates for your survey, although it doesn’t let you edit and republish your surveys unless you delete any responses that you’ve already collected (very annoying!). Opinio doesn’t allow you to set a quota for your survey, which may be annoying to those of you trying to get the most bang for your buck (fees for use of the ASP service are based on the number of surveys completed).
Opinio has a built-in invitation system, whereby you can provide a list of e-mail addresses (either by entering them manually, by pasting them in from the clipboard, or by uploading them in a file) and it will send out both initial invitations and reminders on a schedule you set. The reminder system is actually pretty straightforward and easy to use.
Opinio does not offer panel management functions.
Opinio will allow you to view and delete individual responses, although you can’t edit/delete responses based on search criteria. On a positive note, you can use this functionality to "reopen" a response and then send a link to a user so that they can finish, although in my experience I’m not really sure how often this will prove to be a meaningful feature.
Opinio has a flexible system to prevent users from completing your survey multiple times, either through the use of cookies, IP address, or invitation codes. Surveys can also be protected by passwords or by unique invitation codes (where a user has to click a link in the invitation they receive in order to access the survey).
The system gets extra points for allowing you to save and report on incomplete responses (not a lot of packages do this, and it can be useful if you design your surveys appropriately).
Reporting Capabilities
Opinio some of the best report customization features I’ve seen. In addition to the basic summary reports (which are created for you), the system allows you to create and save custom reports that let you control every element of what appears, how it is formatted, and how the data is filtered. Although it may take a little longer to build a report than on other systems, the result you end up with will be so much better than just about anything else I’ve seen.
Opinio comes with two pre-configured reports: a comment report and a summary report. These are both great for getting you the "quick and dirty" results that are helpful to view during data collection. You can filter the reports based on the data that the date was collected or by any of the responses to any of the questions, and you can use multiple filters per survey (so that the filtering effect is cumulative).
Opinio allows you to control precisely how your report looks.
Depending on which edition of the software you purchase, you then have the ability to create any number of "custom reports." With a custom report you literally can change any element of how the report looks (using either on-screen controls or CSS), what it contains (you determine which questions are included in the report and how the data is filtered), and how each question is reported on (you can, for example, include summary reports, detailed statistics, cross tabulations, free text comments, and charts for each question if you choose).
You can report on each question in a number of ways.
What I especially like about the Opinio reporting engine is the ability to save and regularly tweak the reports you create. This is particularly useful if you have ongoing surveys (such as customer satisfaction surveys) and you want to be able to run regular, consistent reports on your data without having to download it into an analysis package.
Reports can be published to the internet and set to automatically update on a regular basis — so if you want to make your reports available to respondents or members of your organization, you can.
Opinio offers a variety of data export options.
Data from Opinio can be exported and saved for use in other analysis packages. While the software gives you a lot of control over how your data is exported, there aren’t easy, straightforward options for exporting data into common analysis packages such as SPSS or SAS. Objectplanet does offer an Excel export plugin for Enterprise users.
Extensibility
Opinio has been designed so that programmers can create "plugins" that can be integrated into either the survey experience or the survey management experience. Plugins must be written in Java.
In addition to the plugin interface, Objectplanet publishes on its web site a detailed description of the SQL database used to store the surveys/responses — which makes it relatively easy to suck data into your own applications without having to go through the export interface.
Account Management
Opinio is a multi-user survey system, and depending on the type of license you purchase you can create any number of users. Permissions can be set very granularly and you as the system administrator can decide specifically which surveys and reports you want each of your users to have access to.
The user management system in Opinio is highly flexible, yet relatively easy to manage.
System Requirements/Security
Opinio is available both as a ASP/Hosted service or as software you can put on your own web server. The software is platform independent and runs on all major web servers. Although the system comes with a built in database, Objectplanet recommends that you use a separate database package (any will work, including Oracle, MySql, SQL Server, DB2, etc).
Opinio supports clustering, which means that you can have multiple servers running the same surveys and storing the results in the same database (if you’re planning a big installation). The software is scalable and designed to accommodate high loads.
Pricing Structure
The ASP/Hosted version of Opinio comes in a variety of different levels ranging from "Lite" to "Universal." The ASP version alleviates the hassle of setting up and managing your own server and database, but it is usually likely to cost more.
ASP/Hosted Pricing Structure and Options
If you want to install the software on your own server, which in addition to unlimited control over your installation also provides you with unlimited respondents and unlimited reports, is available in two forms: The "Enterprise" edition costs $3,750 and comes with 10 users. The "Corporate" edition starts at $2,000 and is the same as the Enterprise version except it comes with only 5 users and doesn’t allow clustering or multilingual surveys.
Additional Resources
The following resources provide more information about Opinio:
- Opinio Web Site
- Sample Opinio Surveys
- Opinio System Requirements
- Compare Lite, Corporate and Enterprise editions
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Internet Survey Software, Reviews Tags: advanced survey software, attractive-surveys, branching, custom-reports, easy-to-use, email-management, extensible, free trial, good-reporting-engine, Internet Survey Software, multi-language, multi-user, pricing-medium-cost, question-randomization, Reviews, SDK, web-based
