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Case Study 2 - Surveys

[This is a feature of Carousel]

Carousel includes a specialized library for generation and management of survey applications. The surveys are intended for use on embedded devices such as handheld computers, webpads or PDAs but may also be used on desktop computers.

Carousel also includes a facility for management of the survey data.

A typical survey

In this section we will show a sample survey application and highlight some of the common features that you may find useful in building a survey application.

The example is taken from a real application for the hospitality industry but we have changed some of the text. The application was designed for use by guests at the reception desks of hotels.

A welcome screen

A welcome screen is often used to present the user with some information about the survey. In the example shown below we include the option to choose the language in which the survey is presented.

The survey is presented full screen so as to restrict access to the desktop. A special set of keystrokes is used to access an 'easter egg' that provides administration functions for the survey and allows the administrator to close the survey properly.

Following the welcome screen a series of pages presenting questions to the user are shown. The exact content of these pages depends on the question set and possibly the history of the questionaire. The tools built into Carousel include the ability to rotate questions and insert conditional questions or so called 'golden' questions.

Several techniques are available for formatting the questions and the Carousel survey library includes a number of custom widgets for generation of question widgets and custom widgets. The library also provides some extra widgets for things like progress and navigation control

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Finally the application presents a thank you screen that marks completion of the survey. Presentation of this screen also triggers saving of the survey data. The user can no longer go back and change the responses. The screen eventually times out and the welcome screen is presented again for the next survey respondant.

A survey wizard

Surveys can be setup with a simple wizard that takes the user through a few steps to configure the survey content.

First the user is requested to enter some general setup parameters:

Next a choice of styles and color schemes is presented:

and then there are questions about the content of the survey and how it is to be presented to the user.

and finally some options about the survey generation and data source.

If no data is available the survey wizard generates a set of tables in a database. Later the question manager can be used to setup the questionaire. Tables for the resulting data are also configured.

Managing the survey data

The survey libraries shipped with Carousel provide a simple mechanism for loading and saving surveys and survey data. Carousel even includes services for replication of questionaire database tables, fault tolerant transmission of data and tracking of responses.

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