The legend goes that, one day, we will release Design6, our online survey programming package. Check the night sky for a star indicating the Orient because D6 is scheduled for this winter. In the meantime, the D5 team is still very active. As we often do with other software, we first test and release functionalities for offline apps (in 5.4 and 5.5) to make them available later online (in D6). We have communicated already on the new Web Service routing and the changes to AskiaScript so JSON would be natively supported. We have also released the Askia Design Pages (ADP) – the page equivalent to an ADC. This greatly simplifies and augments flexibility to the internet options. One of the main advantages is that you can now create forms that do not require a full refresh of the page.
Since 5.4 a lot of things have happened in Design – not just a revamp of the interface (which we did too!).

Jupiter – just divine

First we added Jupiter – a clever use of the NodeJS technology which turns Design into a local web server. This means you can test your web survey in Chrome or Firefox without publishing the survey and any change to the survey is reflected immediately in the browsers. And if your phone or your tablet is on the same network as your laptop, through WiFi for instance, this means you can test your survey directly on your mobile device.
Even better than this: every test interview that you run is saved so you can interrupt your flow, fix a problem (typo, routing, layout) and come back to the very same screen and see if the changes you have done solved the problem.
Here is a small video showing how this works!

Interactive library

For better survey quality and efficiency, most MR companies heavily template their surveys. If you are testing an ad, you want to simply upload the mp4 media resource, enter the name of the product and maybe the list of its competitors and voila. We have created a whole web app for this (something similar to the systems that Zappi and Wizer offer – contact us if you want more info). The good news is that technology is available in D5 too – this means you can parametrize a whole survey or just a block of questions that you use often like demographics or a max-diff exercise. The great news is that if you have created an analysis portfolio with the template, this portfolio will be directly usable – so your analysis will also be ready in one click.

Another great thing with interactive libraries is that you can specify that a set of responses comes from a database (along with their unique Ids imported as entry codes). This means that if you are maintaining somewhere a list of brands or medias you can ensure your survey is up to date right away – with the possibility of neatly aligning the waves with Surf thanks to these entry codes.

Automate your supervisor

Either you know that we have an API for AskiaField or you never read our blog. If it’s the latter, I have some good news for your first read: there is an API for AskiaField. This means you can totally automate everything a supervisor does: put a survey online, define quota, assign lists and export the data. This has great implications for all the software range.
We have added the “Open live Survey” in Design, Tools and Analyse. It’s a dialog box that asks that you provide a URL (to AskiaField and Supervisor) user name and a password. It then displays the list of surveys you can read according to the Field restrictions. This is crucial for GDPR as the system knows if you have access or not to privately identifiable data and gives you the key to decrypt or not in Tools or Analyse. It also records when you have access to it.

Test your quota in Design

For Design, this means you can modify a survey directly without Supervisor, but that’s not the main advantage. You can query the state of the quota in CCA and test your survey with these very quota. You can – in Design – change the targets, the number of completes and see how it affects your complicated least filled quota. Now you can really test all these great new functions we added in the script engine and that your favourite prolific author described here.

Proper quality management? Check!

There is a little known tool in AskiaWeb which is about to become the coolest Askia feature. In the properties of your survey in Supervisor, you have an option called “Allow feedback”. If you allow that for test interviews (or all interviews), it means that anyone can report a problem in an Askia Survey, highlight the error and the survey programmer receives the error, a capture of the screen with the highlight and the interview with the actual data. How does the the survey programmer get this information? By clicking View / Feedback issues… and all the selected issues are imported and you can reproduce the interview in design at the exact same place that where the bug was reported with the exact same interview data and the correct quota state. We don’t think anyone in the industry has something remotely as good as this!

Web services everywhere

Playing with web services is cool – it allows us to renew your license every year without you having to call and asking for a license key: we simply check if the contract has been renewed in our database and we let you work normally. We can also check if the team has created new ADCs in the Askia library (or modified existing ones) and by connecting to Github where we publish all the controls, you can automatically download all the updates for the your current installed design version.

We have said it before, it’s the dying stars that shine the brightest – the new versions of D5 are blinding! But we believe there will still be a cas for a disconnected app so you can create and test your software without a browser – pretty much like there is still a place for Analyse in the Vista era or or like AskiaFace, our CAPI product, does not need a constant internet connection. Even in this very connected world, there is a place for offline.