Confirmit 12 has been officially released and it features a variety of interesting features that look like they will have a positive impact on both survey developers and users.

For those who don’t know, Confirmit is one of the most prominent online survey software packages. It is used by a number of market research agencies and allows for pretty complicated, interesting surveys. Frankly, I would probably use Confirmit if I could except for the fact that the price tag is higher than I want/need/can afford to spend.

Points to Confirmit for making part of their new release about improving the user experience: some of the new features include a new hierarchy selector (which could be used, say, to let you pick a state and then narrow it down to the city); a new slider for entering numbers (not the first time such a feature has been implemented in a survey software package both GMI and Vovici offer sliders too) which could be fun for scale-type questions; a card sort feature, which allows the respondent to drag and drop responses into different piles. Two improvements I especially like are the "highlight required grid input field" which can be used to show the user precisely which answer they forgot to fill in and the AJAX dynamic content, which makes it possible for other questions to appear or disappear on the page depending on the results of other questions on the same page (without a page refresh).

Confirmit 12 also allows for different images to appear in answers depending on the state of the response. Simply put, this means that you can have one image shown when the answer is not selected (such as an empty check box) and replace it with a different image when the image is selected (such as a checked check box).

Confirmit 12 has new security features as well, although to my untrained eye they don’t seem all that exciting. That is, they’re not so much about protecting the data as much as they are about encrypting the information that is shown to the respondent (so they can’t figure out your secret methodologies). Confirmit 12 does make it possible to set an option that requires the survey to be conducted over a secure, encrypted connection.

Confirmit adds new survey development features, including additional information within the context of the project overview, the ability to increase the size of text box text, and an easier to use URL setup page. The scripting editor also includes a code completion feature similar to what you might find in Visual Studio or Flash. This feature makes it easier to write code by suggesting functions, methods, and properties that are context appropriate.

On the back-end, Confirmit 12 includes a new data processing engine which adds new data import features, data cleaning, recoding and merging features, and new data exports.

Confirmit Express, the simpler version of the survey system, also includes a variety of new features such as a new user administration interface, MS Word export and the ability to quickly and easily test surveys.

For a full list of new features, see the Confirmit web site.

• Confirmit 12 new feature list
• Confirmit 12 web site

Julie Lemaster, an MBA student at the University of California- Riverside, has written an interesting paper (which is posted to the Sloan Center for Internet Retailing web site) entitled "Online Panel Management and Strategies: An Introduction for Managers." It is an introductory guide to managers who have been asked or have decided it is time to start looking into online market research for their companies.

Lemaster contrasts full-service providers, such as M/A/R/C and SSI against complex and potentially expensive "self-serve" packages from Confirmit, Globalpark, GMI, and SurveyZ to low cost providers such as QuestionPro, Survey.com, SurveyMoney, and Zoomerang.

The abstract of the paper summarizes it as providing…

"…an introductory guide to managers who have been asked or have decided it is time to start looking into online market research for their company.  The size of the company you work for does not matter, as we will discuss several methods that can be used for any size company or investment level.  This paper is for managers who want to quickly learn the basic issues of online market research panels.  It will also be useful to managers who need to become familiar with some of the major providers of online panel management."

In addition to reviewing the providers and the various strategies for organizing your panel, Lemaster discusses a variety incentives that can be used to motivate and retain participants, such as lotteries, bonus points, and raffles.

• Online Panel Management and Strategies: An Introduction for Manager

David Tebbut of IWRBlog (Information World Review) recently posted some interesting observations about Confirmit’s dashboard application, in which an online survey system is used to track customer attitudes in real time and report the results in an automatically updated "dashboard" application. The idea is to be able to provide useful research results instantly — as soon as they are relevant — instead of having to wait hours, weeks or days for results.

In my own experience, the greatest challenge to this type of a dashboard — which in some ways speaks to the potential to integrate customer satisfaction directly into a balanced scorecard type system in a meaningful way — is the ability to collect enough data on a regular basis to cause the "dials" on the dashboard to reflect something meaningful. 10 or 15 responses a day are simply not enough for a system that is meant  to be continuously updated.

On the other hand, there are applications where such a system might be somewhat useful and relatively easy to "keep fed." For example, if on the way out of the store there was a single question that customers could answer — either as they walked out the door or as they checked out — and if there were enough registers in the store — it might be possible to collect enough data to make the dashboard meaningful. Or maybe if there were a way to ask the question on customer cell phones as they walk out of the store (perhaps a little less realistic).

Read more about this article at IWRBlog.