Getting started
Installation
See the installation instructions
Overview of the main screens
My Projects
Once you're logged in, the My Projects screens shows you all of your AskPeople projects, and all the available templates you can use to style your forms and surveys. Here's where you administer users and upload logos, pictures or documents you want to include within survey questions or templates.
Project Manager
When you're working with a survey or form, the Project Manager gives you easy access to every stage of the process, from writing the questions, controlling the survey behaviour through the simple settings panel, to managing the data and reports once the responses start to come in. You can also generate plain-text versions of the questionnaire to reformat for paper-based forms or to send to your contacts without web access.
Questionnaire Editor
The questionnaire editor helps you build the survey step by step, inserting new questions, moving questions around, inserting page breaks and more. Creating a question is as easy as typing in the question and putting each response option on a new line in the options box. The survey link is shown at the top of the screen so you can switch to preview mode and back again quickly.
Reports: Topline & Individual Response
The topline report displays counts (the number of respondents who gave each answer) and percentages, and you can cross-analyse one predefined question against another. For example, you might compare whether customers who bought different products gave different ratings for overall satisfaction, or whether repeat visitors to your website are more positive about your new redesign than new visitors.
It's sometimes helpful to be able to look at each response individually - for example, if you're following up a new business enquiry form, or want to have a respondent's survey answers on screen before you call them up to discuss the issues in more depth. Individual reports let you browse each response received as a simple table of questions and answers.
Some sample forms & surveys
Working with questionnaires
Creating a new questionnaire
To create a new questionnaire, choose 'Create new project' from the My Projects screen. Once the survey has been created, you'll be taken straight into the Questionnaire Editor. By default, all new projects are titled 'New project' - you can give your new project a name by choosing 'Title, intro & template' from the menu in the Questionnaire Editor.
Question types & required questions
AskPeople supports the following eight question types:
- Single: a question with a list of options (radio buttons) from which respondents can choose one
- Single grid: a grid-type question with rows of answer options each one of which can be rated at a single point on a scale
- Dropdown: a drop down menu with a list of options, from which respondents can choose one
- Multi: a question with a list of options (tick boxes) from which a respondent can choose as many as apply
- Multi grid: a grid-type question with multiple answer rows from which a respondent can tick multiple columns
- Smallbox: a one-line text box for short written answers
- Bigbox: a multi-line text box with scroll bar for longer written answers
- Pagebreak: marks the end of the current page of questions. This is not displayed to the user, but is shown in the question list within the Questionnaire Editor as an indented item
- Info: a text-only message or instruction. This is displayed to the user, but does not take any input from them. This might be useful if you want to include a long preamble to a question within the questionnaire, or to display a message at the end of the questionnaire, before the user submits it
You can ensure respondents provide an answer to any question by defining it as 'required' from the 'This question is:' dropdown menu. This will mean the respondent cannot submit the form or move to the next page of questions without giving an answer. A red label is shown next to the question indicating that it is required.
Editing questions
When you open up the Questionnaire Editor, the last question in the questionnaire will be displayed and highlighted in yellow in the menu on the left. You can edit another question by clicking on it in the menu. When you've finished editing the questionnaire, click 'Save changes' button. Make sure you save changes each time before you preview the survey using the survey preview link.
Adding new questions
To add a new question to the questionnaire, click the 'Insert new question after...' button.
Deleting or moving questions
To delete a question, click the 'Delete question' button. To move it, use the 'Move to after:' dropdown menu, and the question will be moved to the appropriate position in the list.
Working with question options & scales
You enter the question wording in the 'Question text' box in the Questionnaire Editor. Wording can include HTML to style text with bold or underlines, or to include pictures in the question text. You don't need to use line break
codes: AskPeople automatically converts line breaks in the question text to new lines when the survey is displayed.
For single, dropdown or multi questions, you specify the list of answer options by entering each option on a new line in the 'Responses' box for that question, within the Questionnaire Editor. You can enter a value in the Responses box for smallbox and bigbox questions too - these will appear as pre-filled defaults in the survey form.
Questionnaire Editor
You can transform any single or multi question into a grid question (with a horizontal scale of options for each question option row). For example, you might have a question listing a number of brands and want to ask people how much they like or dislike each one. Just enter each scale point on a new line in the 'Scale' box for that question. You can change the question back to a normal single or multi by deleting the list of scale points at any time.
In a single or multi question (but not a grid), you can define an answer option with an extra textbox to capture an open-ended response - in other words, an 'Other, please specify' question.
Include other_specify: in the list of options to get an answer option with default 'Other, please specify' label. Alternatively, use other_specify:Alternative label to use 'Alternative label' (or any other text) as the label text. Note that you need to include the colon in either case. Please note that you can't use an other (specify) option in a grid question.
Working with questionnaire XML
The underlying format of AskPeople questionnaires is a basic form of XML used to describe the questions and options. Normally, it is more convenient to use the Questionnaire Editor to construct and edit questionnaires, but if you're comfortable with XML, the 'Edit raw script' function accessed from the Project Manager is a way to get the whole questionnaire on screen and do quick find-and-replace actions or cut and paste sections. Use at your own risk - be especially careful of the question IDs as it's easy to get questions out of sequence when editing the XML directly.
Exporting plain text questionnaires
AskPeople can generate plain text versions of questionnaires, with the HTML formatting stripped out - this can sometimes be handy if you need to recreate the questionnaire in Word or send it in the body of an email. To generate a plain text export, choose 'Export plain text version' from the Project Manager screen. This may be suitable as it stands, or may benefit from a bit of tidying up in a word processor before sending by email.
Launching and closing surveys
AskPeople surveys have a setting of 'Open' or 'Closed'. By default, a project is open and therefore able to receive new responses. If you want to close the survey to new responses, choose Manage Project Settings from the Project Manager. Change the Survey Status option from 'Open' to 'Closed'. Any subsequent visitors to your survey will see a polite message telling them the survey is no longer accepting responses (you can edit this message in the Survey Closed Message setting just below the Survey Status option).
Limitations
AskPeople questionnaires do NOT currently enable you to:
- Use survey logic to hide or show questions based on previous answers
- Validate answers given, except to check whether an answer has been given or not. For example, it is not currently possible to check whether a value in a smallbox field is a valid email address, or to ensure that only 3 tickboxes have been selected
- Randomise the order in which questions are asked, though you can turn on randomising of question options within single and multi questions and grids (from Project Settings).
Designing templates
How templates work
AskPeople templates are basically HTML files, which incorporate a fairly standard HTML page framework, some stylesheet rules and a special placeholder () which is where the questions appear. These templates give a designer lots of freedom over how surveys are displayed, and follow the standard rules of HTML and CSS. You or your web designer should be able to replicate the look and feel of your website fairly easily by writing additional rules.
Each template draws on a couple of standard included files:
scripts.js: a small set of Javascripts (which provide additional non-essential functionality)
styles.css: a base stylesheet which defines the core styles for question text, grids, required questions etc
Editing templates
To edit an existing template, choose it from the Templates list in My Projects. It will open with a preview of the template. To edit the underlying template code, click the yellow button. Make your edits and click the 'Save changes' button - the preview will then be updated with your changes.
Creating new templates
To create a new template based on the Default style, choose 'Create new template' from My Projects.
Alternatively, you can duplicate any other template and use that as the basis for your new template. Choose the template you want to duplicate, and look for the 'Duplicate template' option below the template preview.
Uploading files
AskPeople includes a basic tool for uploading and storing files you might want to include within your templates or questionnaires. Users with higher levels of access privileges can upload or delete files - choose 'Upload images & files' from My Projects.
Example: developing a new template with your logo
Coming soon...
Dealing with data
Downloading data to Excel
AskPeople's native format for storing data is as tab-delimited text. This makes the datafiles ready for easy analysis in Excel or other software that can handle tab-delimited text. Each file contains the data from each responses as a separate row, with each question (or answer option for grids/multis) as a column. There are also column headers with the question ID and wording.
To download data in Excel-ready format, choose 'Download data' from the Project Manager.
Working with individual responses
To browse each individual response to your questionnaire, choose 'View individual responses' from the Project Manager. You'll be able to select each separate response (in the order they were submitted) from the drop down menu, and see that respondent's answers against each question. See the Tips & Tricks section for advice on how to use unique user IDs to make it easier to tell respondents apart and match their responses up with data from other databases.
Working with topline reports
For most survey projects which use single or multi questions, you'll also want to look at the percentages who gave different answers. Choose 'View topline results' from the Project Manager and you'll see a series of results tables for each question. You can choose whether to show all questions, or just a single one; or whether to show percentages, raw counts or both.
Cross-analysing one question against another can provide an interesting way of identifying different patterns in people's feedback. For example, you might cross-analyse a question about people's satisfaction with your website, by their age, to see whether younger or older visitors were more satisfied. You can cross-analyse the topline report by choosing a single or multi (but not a grid) question from the 'Analyzed by:' drop down menu in the Topline Results report.
Getting new responses emailed to you
All responses are saved in the project datafile, but you can also choose to have all new responses emailed directly to a nominated address as an HTML attachment to an email. These responses follow the same format as the Individual Response Report.
To enable this, choose 'Manage project settings' from the Project Manager, and set the 'Send each completed survey form by email to' setting to the email address you want to use to receive the forms.
Sharing reports with other people
If you want to share a report with someone else, but don't want to give them access to the full AskPeople admin system (with the power to alter questionnaire design and make changes to data), set them up as a new user with their own login, but with lower access privileges. This assumes you have access privileges of 7 or higher. See the section on Managing Users for information about creating new users. Once you have set up the user, you should send them the direct links to the reports you want to share. These are shown at the top of the screen for both the Topline and Individual Results Reports.
Editing data
If you need to make a direct edit to the datafile - for example, to take out a duplicate response, or clear test data - choose 'View & edit raw data' from the Project Manager. Each response appears as a row in the field, starting with the date and time it was submitted. Find the row you want to remove, delete it and save the datafile. You'll need to be careful of course when doing this, as it's easy to inadvertently delete the wrong responses - consider making a backup of the datafile first ('Backup project by email' from the Project Manager), which only takes a couple of seconds.
Tips & Tricks
Redirect the user at the end of the survey
By default, when a user submits their response, they are shown a final confirmation screen thanking them for their submission. You can alter the text of this final screen within the project settings.
Instead of this screen, you can redirect respondents automatically to another website URL when they submit the form. To enable this, choose 'Manage project settings' and enter a URL for the 'Final URL' setting.
n.b. if any URL is specified here, then users will not see the final message specified - they will be redirected immediately to the specified URL. To re-enable the message page, just make sure the 'Final URL' setting is blank.
Rotating the list of answer options
Sometimes, the order in which answer options are presented in a questionnaire can affect the answers people give - options at the top and bottom of the list may tend to be chosen more than average. To ensure that these 'ordering effects' don't give you a misleading result, you can get AskPeople to randomly reorder the answer options for the single/multi questions and grids in a questionnaire. To do this, choose 'Manage project settings' from the Project Manager, and set 'Randomise option order' to 'On'.
Backing up your projects
AskPeople stores its questionnaires and data as files on your webserver. It's a good idea to make regular backups of these files to your own desktop machine, in case of problems or non-availability of the server. It's really easy to do this: just choose 'Backup project by email' from the Project Manager and the project questionnaire, datafile, settings and template will be emailed straight to your logged-in email address.
Tracking unique user IDs
When a respondent accesses the survey form, AskPeople checks whether the link they used includes a uid=123 value. If so, then this uid (User ID) of '123' is saved to the datafile along with their responses; if not, then the response is recorded as an anonymous one. So, if you want to be able to tell your responses apart (for example, so you can match survey respondents up to a customer database via their customer number, or to know which contacts from a mailing list have responded to your survey), make sure you include different &uid=UNIQUEID values in the links you give them, for example:
User 1: http://www.askpeople.co.uk/demo/survey.php?sid=DF4FC7&uid=ABCD1
User 2: http://www.askpeople.co.uk/demo/survey.php?sid=DF4FC7&uid=ABCD2
User 3: http://www.askpeople.co.uk/demo/survey.php?sid=DF4FC7&uid=ABCD3
Once you have a unique user ID value stored with each response, then you may be able to match the responses with data you have in other databases. For example, if you use a customer number as the unique ID, you might be able to match up responses with your customer database using Excel lookups, in order to compare survey preferences with actual buying behaviour.
What happens to deleted projects?
You can delete a project from the Project Manager. Rather than being wiped from the system, the questionnaire, settings and datafile are moved to a 'trash' directory where they no longer appear in the projects list. If you want to remove the files completely from your server, you need to manually delete them using your FTP software.
Managing Users
AskPeople supports unlimited numbers of users of the admin system. When you install the software, you will be prompted to create a new master user with the highest level of access privileges.
To set up or change users, choose 'Manage users' from My Projects. You can create new users, reset passwords or change levels of access.
User access levels range from 0 to 10:
Level 0 = suspended user. A suspended user is no longer able to log into the system.
Level 1-3 = a report viewer user. These users will only be able to access links to reports, but won't be able to see the Project Manager or edit the Questionnaire
Level 4-6 = a project manager. These users can create, edit and delete questionnaires, and manage datafiles as well as viewing reports.
Level 7-10 = a superuser. These users can manage and create/change other users, as well as having the rights of a project manager.
Reference & Support
If this 'help' hasn't helped, there are some other options for finding out about AskPeople:
- The Frequently Asked Questions
- A forum, for discussions and support about installation or using AskPeople, bug reports and feature requests
- The feedback form can be used to send queries or reports to us directly. We do our best to provide reasonable support AskPeople, but please use the Forum in the first instance
What's changed from Clipboard?
AskPeople is a big leap forward in functionality, ease of use and general polish:
- Entirely new survey display module - supports grids, dropdowns, pagebreaks and more
- Redesigned administration console, now split into defined projects
- Enhanced topline reporting allowing cross-analysis of questions
- New housekeeping tools e.g. project backup, global settings
- Direct data download to Excel (tab delimited); cleaner datafile format for easier analysis in Excel
- Results by email option to receive results immediately when submitted
- New 'settings' files per project, allowing for cleaner template files
- User-friendly installer
- Multiple users, administered via My Projects
- Variety of ready-to-use templates
- Improved accessibility, and much less reliance on Javascript
- Better reliability across browsers and PHP versions
Licensing information
AskPeople is licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike licence. This means you can use, adapt and redistribute the software as long as you:
- Name AskPeople and attribute the source as Pentri.com
- Release any modified versions you produce under this same licence (i.e. you cannot take this software, adapt it, and then charge for it)
For more information or the full licence text, see the Creative Commons website.
