Succint On-Site Online Survey

Recently Brian Calder asked me to participate in the beta program of a really cool mini-survey tool called Xurtle.

http://blog.xurtle.com/beta-program

See the survey on the right side of this blog – it’s a survey I created using Xurtle.

This is a tool that, as he says, “can satisfy or complement your online customer feedback collection needs” but I see it more as a Web site visitor engagement tool. I was able to create a new survey and post it into my blog within a matter of minutes. I took my time because, well, for two reasons – I wanted to play with the wording and size of the questions, and because I was recording my experience so I could give Brian some constructive feedback. But I could have set it up and published it very quickly and effortlessly.

I’m completely sold on the idea of an online survey that resides on my Web site. Other survey tools take the user away from the site to their survey site; other tools are too complicated and have me doing programming. With Xurtle, I have a survey that fits in the widgets column of my blog and all that is necessary is a URL (which Xurtle generates) that points to the Xurtle site where the engine resides. But the survey is on my site. I’ll have more to report on this, as I create a more complete review of the product soon. But I wanted to let everyone know, I am pleased with the product and was able to include some feedback for Brian including some cool enhancement ideas.