Using simple timed hosted surveys to get customer feedback: a mashup

Spent the Easter weekend reading Avinash Kaushik's Web Analytics: an hour a day and experimenting with a simple survey tool called PollDaddy. I love hosted 3rd party tools but they can be frustrating because they rarely do exactly what you want. Time to put my Javascript coding head on and see whether I could mashup PollDaddy into what I wanted.

Avinash makes a great point when he argues that good web analytics must include qualitative as well as quantitative data. We can use Google Analytics (or similar) for the later but how to do the former? I wanted to be able to use a survey to ask my visitors some simple questions but I wanted more than a fixed feedback link. What I really wanted was to ask only those visitors who had committed some time to a site to be asked for their responses.

PollDaddy is a really great Web 2.0 survey engine and is simple to set up and deploy. My project was to write some Javascript (including cookies) that would count the number of pages that a visitor had seen and after a fixed number show a striking but discrete alert asking for their feedback. The visitor could either click and have PollDaddy's survey appear or cancel and not be bothered again.

Like most weekend projects this took a few key steps:

1. Sign-up for a PollDaddy account (free for the number of survey responses I expect to get)
2. Find code on the web for the bits of Javascript I needed: cookies, overlays, integrating style sheets
3. Build the prototype locally on my home machine
4. Debug until it was right
5. Upload the Javascript code to some of my own hosting space
6. Test the remotely hosted code with pages on my laptop
7. Integrate the code within my test shop The Market Quarter
   
8. Debug again to remove a name clash between Shopify and my CSS
9. Document here and on my own blog www.jonathanbriggs.com
   

Anyway, it works. I look forward to getting some feedback from Market Quarter customers. What iseven better, is that this simple approach can be applied to any other other site where customer feedback would be useful. Time to approach some of our clients...