Review of Spinfish Web’s Beeliner Surveys
Beeliner Surveys is a simple, easy-to-use and extremely inexpensive online survey service operated by Cambridge, Massachusetts based @Spinfish Web/ROG. Although its survey capabilities and design flexibility are very limited, the system is very easy to use and it includes some very unique and useful features, such as the ability to include full surveys within e-mail messages and create custom reports that can be saved and reused. While the program does have some security issues and while it does very much limit your options in terms of the types of questions you can ask, organizations looking to conduct a quick and easy survey may find the program does what they need at a price they can afford.
Surveying Capabilities
Beeliner offers the most basic question types: single selection radio buttons or drop-down boxes, multiple selection check boxes or list boxes, open-ended fill-in-the-blank questions (both single line and paragraph), single line rating questions, and a somewhat flexible grid/matrix question. It doesn’t support constant sum or ranking questions, and you can’t edit the font faces, sizes, or colors within the context of the editor (even when I tried to embed HTML codes it didn’t work). It does offer a few special purpose questions such as an US address question (when you add one of these questions it automatically requests the street, city, state and zip of the respondent), a yes/no question, and a "remove me" check box, but for the most part I can’t tell why I wouldn’t just go and create the questions on my own using the standard options.
Beeliner scores points due to the fact that, despite its overall simplicity, it does offer response validation for the major question types. For example, you can control whether text is entered as a date, time, number, or even an e-mail address. You can also control the size of the text box (both horizontally and vertically). For the multi-selection questions, you can require that a minimum number of boxes are checked or that a maximum number of boxes are checked.
Beeliner does not support any advanced survey features. All Beeliner surveys are single-page and consequently do not support branching or piping. Survey responses cannot be pre-populated, and you cannot randomize the order of your matrix questions or the orders of answer options in multiple choice or single choice questions.
Beeliner also doesn’t support of the use of images, audio, or any other kind of multi-media in each question, which may be important to know if you’re engaged in research that requires such assets. It also doesn’t support the inclusion of hyperlinks (so you can’t even have them click a link to get to the image of the product you want to ask them about).
Survey Design/Development
Beeliner is promoted as being really easy to use ("You don’t need to hire a techie or engage your IT department to create an online or email survey. Do it all yourself using Beeliner."). This is true. Beeliner is extremely easy to use and has a thoughtfully designed survey manager/editor that mimics the experience of using a desktop application. A very simple application to be sure, but for many people just trying to get a quick survey out, this may be enough.
Tell the system you want to create a new survey and you’re presented with four basic development panels: "Layout," "Intro," "Questions," and "Closing." The layout page lets you choose one of four different design templates ("contemporary," "creative," "special," and "stripes") although as far as I could tell they looked pretty much the same (really — the samples displayed above each option look the same, and when I selected different ones it didn’t seem to impact my survey). You can choose from around 30 different color palettes and you are allowed to upload your own logo to go above your survey. Those are all of the layout options you get (remember — you can’t control the font size, shape or color).
The next page, "Intro" is even more simple than the first. You can include title of your survey as you want it displayed, the sender of the survey (presumably your name or e-mail address), and an introductory paragraph (that presumably goes at the top of the survey).
The "Questions" page is next, and it is both simple and intuitive. Click "Add" to add a question. Click "Edit" — or just double click a question — to edit it. There are up and down buttons to let you shift the order of your questions. As noted earlier, only single page questions are supported so page management is not an issue.
When you edit a question, it opens up in a separate window much as you would expect from an application on your desktop. All of the options for the question-type you’ve chosen can be found in the pop-up window, and while it isn’t the prettiest thing in the world, it gets the job done and the purpose of each option is fairly obvious. A spell-check button is available for both the question box and the option box.
Beeliner does offer a handy dandy preview button that can be pushed at just about any time during the development process to see what your survey is going to look like.
Beeliner does not offer any pre-written surveys for you to adapt for your own purposes. Nor, for that matter, does it allow you to maintain a library of your previously used questions (for the sake of consistency) and scales, and you can’t copy questions from previous surveys.
Overall, I’d say that while the survey development system is fairly simplistic and doesn’t offer a lot of tools that the frequent survey writer would find useful, it is very easy to understand, very responsive, and might even prove appealing to users who create surveys infrequently and who don’t want to deal with a significant learning curve.
User Experience
One of the elements that Beeliner unique compared to some of the other survey systems I’ve looked at recently is the fact that it allows you to send your surveys in e-mail messages (users see the survey when they open their e-mail message, rather than having to click a link). Which to some degree explains why surveys can have only one page each.
While this offers a certain amount of flexibility (I’m not sure why anyone would really need it, but it theoretically could lead to higher response rates) it does mean that longer surveys look really, really long…and experience has shown (my experience) that really, really long looking surveys don’t go over so well with respondents (incidentally, I’m also not in favor of putting every question on its own page — I’ve actually conducted surveys on this subject, and users say that they prefer when you include several related questions together on a page — in other words, minimize the number of pages that you use, but don’t make pages ridiculously long either).
Meanwhile, without graphics or even much in the way of design the surveys themselves don’t look very exciting or fun (they seem very utilitarian). At the same time, none of your users should be come confused about the interface.
Incidentally, the fourth tab of the survey development manager ("Closing") allows you to include text that will appear on the bottom of the survey as well as text that will appear on a page that will appear after the user hits the "Submit" button at the end of the survey. The page also allows you to do something that I haven’t seen very often, which is to let your respondents review all of the results of the survey by pushing a button. Certainly, people like to look at survey results and this might even motivate people to complete the survey.
Respondent Management
As noted previously, one of the more unique features of Beeliner is the ability to send out your survey as an e-mail message. Basically what you do is type in or import all of your respondent e-mail address into the program, press the "Send" button and off goes your survey. The system keeps track of which respondents complete the surveys and which don’t. Beeliner also allows you to take a more "traditional" approach in which you send people a link to the survey which is hosted on the Beeliner web site. In either case, the status of the respondent is tracked by the system.
Beeliner also allows you to post a link on your web site (or, for that matter, e-mail out a link using your own e-mail software) that takes you to the survey. One thing I did notice here that you may or may not care about is the fact that Beeliner is using sequential respondent and survey IDs that can easily be "cracked" to allow people to view (and take!) your survey whom you may not want to be able to do this. When most security conscious survey systems create respondent links, they tend to use a random collection of letters and numbers as an ID (for example, "http://www.survey.com/survey.aspx?s=A32D43929S2"). Beeliner is using something more like "http://www.survey.com/survey.aspx?s=1252" where it is easy to guess that the next survey is 1253, and the one after that is 1254, etc. Even in the surveys that are sent via e-mail, it is possible to manipulate the ID that they send so that you can view other client surveys (even if the other client chooses not to make their surveys public!).
One neat feature of the system is the ability to set "events" where Beeliner will send and resend your survey to your participants who haven’t completed the survey according to a set schedule. Beeliner also lets you activate your survey when you want and then deactivate your survey when you want to stop collecting responses.
Beeliner does not allow you to edit or delete individual responses or responses selected based on criteria you indicate.
Reporting
Beeliner is totally into pie charts. That was the first sense I got when I opened the "Summery Report" to see that just about everyone one of my questions, regardless of type, had been presented in the form of a pie chart (except for one, which was presented as a bar chart). I like the fact that it easy to look at all of the responses to all of the questions at one time (instead of having to select each question separately).
Considering the overall capabilities of Beeliner and the type of user this package is aimed at, the reporting options offered by the system may be OK. There is nothing really advanced here — it is possible to generate summary reports and some kinds of detail reports. It is also possible to view all of your responses in spreadsheet form, or even have the results exported into a PowerPoint presentation (that, by the way, is unique — I haven’t seen that before).
Beeliner does offer some more advanced features that I would not ordinarily expect to find, such as the ability to create custom reports where you can control which questions are presented, the order in which they are presented, the types of charts that are displayed, the text that appears in the report…plus you can filter the data that appears in the report based on criteria that you choose. After you finish designing your report you can even save your report — something that many much more advanced survey systems will not let you do.
To be perfectly honest, I really liked this custom report feature and it is one of the best, most thoughtfully implemented features of Beeliner. However, even good things can be improved, and the feature could be even more useful if it included the ability to run reports for surveys entered during a specific period (for example, if you wanted to be able to run a regular weekly report of feedback that was received during the past week).
Finally, one additional nice feature of the reporting system is the ability to send reports out to participants or to other e-mail addresses you choose at any time. While this isn’t necessarily as useful as dynamically updating a published report that anyone can access (provided they have the URL), I’ll go so far as to say it is the next best thing and might be useful for organizations who conduct surveys and then want to be able to send the results out to members.
All in all, the reporting system is fairly basic, but the inclusion of the custom reporting feature (with the ability to save custom reports!) gives it a special place in my heart.
Account Management
Beeliner does allow you to add multiple users to your account, although it would appear that every user you add has full access to all of your surveys, all of your reports, etc. The only thing you can do is indicate whether or not you want specific users to have the ability to view and pay bills.
Pricing
Beeliner is a subscription service that grants you a certain number of responses each month in exchange for a monthly fee. To receive all of the functionality described in this review, it is worth noting that you need to purchase a "Beeliner Enterprise" account (at a price I am still working on finding out).
Beeliner also, however, offers a set of "Lite" reports which offer much of the functionality at a very low price. The smallest "Lite" package — the Beeliner Lite Professional Package — offers 500 responses a month for $28.95 (6 cents a response) while the biggest lite package (the Beeliner Lite Guru) offers 5000 responses a month for $94.95 (a little less than 2 cents per response).
For more information about Beeliner, visit http://www.beelinersurveys.com.
Related Categories & Tags
Internet Survey Software, Reviews Tags: Beeliner, custom-reports, easy-to-use, email-surveys, Internet Survey Software, pricing-low-cost, Reviews, Spinfish, web-based
