Three tools for online surveys

Opina

The second candidate comes from Spanish software vendor Klicap [6] and is released under the GPLv2. Opina is free, but you can purchase various support packages on the website at annual prices of between EUR 500 and 2,500. The survey tool also works with typical LAMP servers.

I looked at version 2.7.0 (November 2013). Before installing, you need to add Tomcat 6 and make sure Java 7 is available. You also need to run the MySQL command-line tool or a utility such as phpMyAdmin to create a MySQL database for the Opina user and assign a password.

Drop the downloaded ZIP archive into the Tomcat servlet container – on the lab machine, this was /usr/share/tomcat6/webapps – then change the owner and group of the Opina directory and its subdirectories:

chown -R tomcat:tomcat opina

Next, launch the text editor and enter information for the database and the SMTP server in two files, as described in the manual [7]. You must at least enter the SMTP port. Finally, you can launch the Tomcat service with this call:

service tomcat6 start

Opina is now accessible in your browser on http://example.com:8080/opina. The default admin account has the user name hello@opinahq.com and the password opina. You will not find a way to change the email address and password via the web interface. Thus, it's a very good idea to create a new administrative account. To do this, go to the Users tab in the dashboard and add two standard roles (Administrator and User).

The activation mail speaks Spanish, and the link is incomplete. You need to copy the string that starts with /s/register, add it to the Opina URL (http://example.com:8080/opina), and then set a password. After that, you can remove the default admin account.

Spanish Inquisition

The Settings menu item lets you define the time zone and set the language. Right now, the choice is Spanish or English, although the English seemed a bit buggy at times. Two other options in the setup dialog link the program, on request, with the cloud address management tools Highrise and Zyncro. At first glance, Opina looks much clearer than its competitors, but this comes at the cost of functionality. Clicking New survey in the dashboard takes you to your first survey.

In an input form, you need to enter the name and a brief description of the survey. This opens a new tab, and in the lower half, you will see tabs in which you can do some fine tuning. You create the questions below Questions, then use Design to organize them and enhance the results with other elements. In the Publication tab, you then prepare the survey for publication. The remaining tabs are for access control, the invitation function, evaluation, and export options.

Nine question types are available, including text questions, yes/no questions, matrix questions, or gradients, which correspond to the five-point selection in LimeSurvey. Like LimeSurvey, Opina shows a preview, although it is tiny (Figure  4).

Figure 4: Pressing New prompts Opina to show you all nine question types, including tiny thumbnails.

If you select the multiple-choice option, you first need to choose the data type. Opina distinguishes between text, numeric values, dates, times, or a combination of date and time. Additional options are available for most questions, and these fold out of the user dialog when you press a plus sign. Checkboxes also let you define whether participants can omit a response or select multiple responses.

You have no option for assigning conditions for each question or installing branches in the survey. Opina surveys always run in the order specified by the admin. The other configuration options for the questions are rather modest. Design, for example, gives you a rudimentary approach for organizing surveys without answers before releasing them. The arrow keys specify the order of the questions (Figure 5). You can also enhance the survey with additional optional text blocks to guide participants through the data collection.

Figure 5: The Opina Design tab does not offer any genuine design options. However, the function that lets you adjust the order with the arrow symbols is useful.

Using the Add menu, you can create new questions and groups; however, these do not have the same function as in LimeSurvey. Instead, they merely divide the survey visually into sections. Multimedia content is not allowed in Opina; you are limited to plain text. Additionally, I failed to find a way to distribute the questions over multiple pages. Thus, a long survey means lots of scrolling for the participants.

Language Exchange

Under Publication, you can put the finishing touches to your survey before publication. This process involves entering a welcome message and a goodbye message, a header, and a footer. You can also set a title here and configure the address on which the poll is reachable. If you repeat the survey later, you just enter a new title and a new URL, rather than starting from scratch. The eye icon opens a preview of unpublished surveys; you can close them manually by clicking on the padlock icon.

A timer for quizzes and tests is missing. Also, creating an individual layout involves workarounds. By default, Opina comes with the default theme, and a search on the web brought no alternative looks to light. The project website states that the vendor will develop themes for customers on request. Alternatively, users with CSS skills can edit the stylesheets in the ui/css directory on the server.

In the current version, the program does not offer a function for anonymizing surveys. It logs IP addresses and displays them in the Reports tab. Testers did not find any way to disable this behavior. In the Access control tab, admins can define whether a survey is open or closed, and whether users need a password or ticket to participate. In the field next to this, you can select users who receive an invitation by mail from the list of contacts created previously.

The messages have the same problems as the registration feature; the URL in the email is truncated. Again, you need to add the string to the Opina URL http://example.com:8080/opina.

The second candidate only exports the results, which it saves as CSV or SPSS files. I failed to find an export function for the survey itself or import functions that let users read finished surveys or individual questions.

Graphical analysis of the surveys is located below Track and in Reports. The first tab records the progress (Figure 6), and the second generates a summary with bar graphs and offers insight into the responses of individual participants under Respondents.

Figure 6: To view the progress of a survey, along with detailed information about the participants, check out the Track tab. At the top, you can configure the display interval.

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