Complex web surveys are currently hard to build or impossible to build with many existing tools. Though there are hundreds of tools available, not one is satisfactory for many complex academic experiments that require randomization, complex branching, hosting your own site to keep data private. Cost can be prohibitive (ranging from $10/month to $60,000 per seat). Many of the other tools have poor UIs and many produce surveys with a low quality look and feel. The Web Survey Toolbox improves on all that. I am the project lead and primary developer, but many other people have helped to develop this into the most flexible survey tool available (see feature comparison).

Using the Web Survey Toolbox, you can make most web surveys by using a GUI. Then, if you have an unusual survey requirements as we so often do, you can add any number of custom features by adding a bit of Java code in the JSP pages. When doing complex web surveys, frequently you need to do something no one has ever done before -- so it has been designed so you can do anything by editing small chunks of JSP. Multiple people can work on the survey at once to build large, flexible, easy to use surveys.

Thousands of people have filled out surveys with the Web Survey Toolbox, and well over 50 different surveys have been built with the survey tool just at Carnegie Mellon. There have been over 4400 downloads as of June 2006. More people start using it every week. See screenshots, or try a survey.

There's also a drag-and-drop clustering survey available, which lets people sort items into groups. With the data, you can do statistical analyses to understand how people group items together, and use the results to come up with new grouping categories. This works in over 95% of the browser market (and I built it before the recent rush of drag-n-drop web applications). Try it out.

In 2003-2005, three groups of HCI masters students studied how people build web surveys, and they designed the GUIs and did user testing with the software. An alpha version is currently available for download. Peter Centgraf and Saagar Patel also have helped to build a survey management website which makes it easy for users to do everything from a one-stop website.

Many people and projcts have supported or contributed to this project. This project has been supported by the Project On People And Robots, HomeNet, and ReserveSport. Thank you to all the people who have helped.

HCI Masters Student Teams: Patrick Barry, Peter Centgraf, Ben Glenn, Evangeline Haughney, Sandi Lowe, Lisa Edelman, Duen Horng Chau, Ronald Conescu, John (Cole) Jitkoff, Laura Treichler, Kayre Hylton, Michele Clarke