Interesting suggestion regarding coding open-ends. A tool to help with text analysis would be a great addition to the software.

What do you use for text coding right now?

Currently we have an inhouse program that was developed a couple of years ago ,, we are looking to refine this for todays trends in coding open ends and allowing for back coding open ends to a close end response when the open answer matches the close end label

I am a Director of a data processing company in the UK and started using Limesurvey a few years ago to branch out into the scripting/hosting of Market Research surveys.
We used a couple of paid services initially (Fluidsurveys and QuestionPro) but couldn't justify the monthly costs as we weren't conducting many surveys.

I've found the community here invaluable, especially TPartner, when trying to work around some of the limitations of Limesurvey which nearly always were solvable via a javascript workaround.
We haven't upgraded to version 2 yet as I haven't had time to look into it but hopefully there will have been some improvements in the Quotas/Conditions workings.

For the analysis of the data we export the data to csv and then convert for analysis using our own software.
A triple-s export facility would be a great addition to Limesurvey.

Cheers

Paul

I'm new here and I was glad to find out about LimeSurvey for Market Research. I'm going to advise it to my boss. We make [url=nospam please]nospam please[/url] for the clients. I hope that it will make our work easier and more professional.

i have no clue

spacejanitor wrote: As such, there is a huge opportunity for LimeSurvey to become a very credible competitor to all of the licensed survey software out there, which takes in hundreds of millions of dollars per year in licensing alone.

Can Limesurvey be for data collection be what R is for analytics?

Why focus on MR? When I look at the participation rate to articulate features or vote for features I see this
bugs.limesurvey.org/plugin.php?page=Gaug...0&order=desc&start=0

What are the five most wanted/needed features from MR point of view?
Looping, Other Answer Text behind every item; No answer at the end of item list; Lists (predefined and dynamic constructed)..

How big is the difference to e.g. social science?
What amount of developer hours would be needed to implement them.
What amount of money should be raised to implement them.

Confirmit and Questback are moving away from MR directly to the customers of MR.
The growth rate in MR will be low if they don't lower there prices.
If MR is into Conjoint they need SawtoothSoftware. Alternatives are rare. Next year Sawtooth will only offer licenses on yearly base.

The biggest asset of limesurvey is easy selfhosting. Try this with Confirmit or Questback (Globalpark software is PHP based too and was years ago also offered for selfhosting. But with a few strings attached.).

Compliance may be a driver for LimeSurvey. If selfhosting and datacenter location is no issue, a service like SurveyGizmo is attacking Confirmit and Questback nicely.


Perhaps it is time to make a survey to ask everyone landing on Limesurvey.
I remember we had this once.

I second that Expression Manager was a big step forward.
When I first saw the EM I was flashed. But TMSWhite is no longer part of the team.

To me it is a bit of a wonder that Limesurvey is still evolving in that niche with such a quality. Would be interesting to know if any of the active developers ever used software like Confirmit, Questback/Globalpark or Sawtoothsoftware. And the secret to stay motivated in terms of coding.

Hi Jelo,

I have seeen a few of your posts lately and I can feel a certain frustration with Limesurvey from your side.

While I can understand where it might come from, I would like to give you my point of view here.

I would love Limesurvey to compete with professional tools like Confirmit and Questback. But we need to face reality. From what I remember, our Globalpark license probably cost more per year than the yearly Limesurvey budget (good guess, I don't have any exact figures for both).

Globalpark / Questback and Confirmit play undoubtely in the premier league of questionnaire tools. I would be supprised if Limesurvey, a open source tool developed by a handfull of more or less fixed developers, none of which is doing this full time (from what I can see).

Of course we can compare the accomplishments of a project like Limesurvey with these companies that has various full time programmers on their staff is possible, as they are playing more or less in the same area, but it feels slightly "unfair". Saying that: I am at all suprised that Limesurvey is far from where these other tools are.

On the other hand, I remember that it took long until new features were in implemented in Globalpark as well. This was especially frustrating as we had/have quite a close relationship and we gave them a lot of free ideas and tips on how to improve their product. There were times where we had to program a "card sort" solution via Javascript to be able to implement it in Globalpark. This took a intern not very long, so imagine a full time programmer that is familiar with the tool and doesn't do anything else. Not sure if it is implemented yet (about 10 years later). So things are (or at least have been) not that easy with the commercial tools either.

And as I said, the tools you are mentioning are top notch solutions. There is a huge market with tools "in between" that are playing in a lower league and still survive and are used. This suprises me a lot more, as they are not sooo far away from Limesurvey.

Actually I am quite impressed how much you can do with Limesurvey, when you put things in relation.

Don't get me wrong: I feel that there are soo many things that can and should be improved in Limesurvey.

For example the GUI. While it might feel that new and different features are more important, I feel that Limesurvey could gain a lot more users in its own niche (I feel that Survey Monkey and Co are the real competitors to compare with). Limesurvey came a long way in terms of ease of installation and update. I feel this is working pretty well now. But GUI is important and while things work well, it is not the quickest and of course not very attractive compared to the new tendencies in GUI design. Right or wrong, people like to work with beautiful things and a nice, simple, modern and beautiful GUI will impress first time users and testers and motivate them to go forward. But this might be just my impression and I totally get that this would involve major work which might increase the gap in features to professional solutions even more.

But let me tell you something: A lot of questionnaires and surveys go over my desk per year, from the most diverse companies from Europe, the US and Asia. If I would have to guess, Limesurvey could cover 80% of the surveys that are applied out of the box. Another 10-15% will be possible with some kind of T-Partners workarounds in Javascript. The other 5% are either not possible or would need major work on the core. This is an estimate, but I don't think that I am too off.

When you say that there are almost no alternatives to tools like Sawtooth when it comes to Conjoint, I totally agree. But this gives me also the impression that there is not much market available, or it is a extremely difficult and costly to implement, otherwise another big one would have stepped in.

But there are myriads of different survey solutions out (low, mid and top range) there and they all seem to survive.

I am in no way involved or informed about the development of Limesurvey, but I would guess that there is so much small things to fix and keep up to date, that there is little time for "thinking big" and strategic thoughts. We also have to keep in mind what Limesurvey is and how it is organized. This is quite similar for many OS projects.

While they might benefit applying some techniques that are used in corporations, I don't think this is very easy to implement in OS projects that live of the work of voluntaries. As a project leader you can tell your team what to do, if you thing it is the right way. No mather what they think of it. It might not be the best style, but you can. Do that in an open source project and see after a few weeks how many active contributers are left....

That became quite long now. All in all, I would also love Limesurvey to progress quicker, with a clearer strategy. But to be honest, I am quite impressed and happy where Limesurvey is right now and how it has evolved since I have used it for the first time.

EM was a huge step forward, but we can't expect that to happen all the time. I don't know why TMSWhite left the team, but from what I understood it was because he felt that EM was what he wanted it to be at this point. And he comes back from time to time to the forum to respond...

What I feel is the most urgent future tendency: Make Limesurvey mobile ready (front end / surveys)! First step: a responsive template among the default templates shipped with Limesurvey.

Then for market research purposes a good reporting would be great. But to be honest, Globalpark's reporting was never very good either (haven't seen it for a while though - talking about 2008 and before).

Well, I stop here for now. But I am willing to discuss this further.

holch wrote: I have seeen a few of your posts lately and I can feel a certain frustration with Limesurvey from your side.

Thanks for your extensive post.
This thread seems to be started to get MR companies/users/community on board and hopefully bringing support in terms of ideas and sponsorship. Spacejanitor might want to correct my if I got it wrong.

I cannot be frustrated with Limesurvey itself. I would have no right to do so.
It's an offer. I cannot look into the minds of the developers and project team. Not sure where their aims are in terms what Limesurvey should be in the next years.

Limesurvey is ahead of many products in the marketplace. I didn't wanted to mentioned bad examples. Not sure how this plays out in a public forum. The knowledge of user and the lockin costs are helping that crappy survey software is still widely used.
I think we will find many usercases where LS is the quickest tool to realize a survey.

As long as there is only a small subset of the userbase is joining this board and only a subset of them are interested beyond getting there problems solved I don't see a strong signal to what features are really wanted.
As a developer you shouldn't following the hardcoreusers or elephants in the forum, which demanding features, which nobody else is using in years. The problem might be that many users are only executing one survey per year

When looking into the feature requests in mantis I come to the conclusion that a main difference in the userbase is between "Reporting/Analytics inside Limesurvey" vs. "LimeSurvey only for datacollection".
I would expect that MR/Science is more focused on datacollection with limesurvey. The SMB/private segment is stronger in the demand for better reporting.

The offer of the fulltime position as a developer looks like a change.

Hi Jelo

I think we are mostly on the same page.

The problem that I see with market research companies is that many are not interested in a open source tool, either because they are locked in, or because they don't want to "risk" it. This is not just a problem in the MR industry, but I think it is one of the main points.

It is so much "easier" and "saver" to go for the big player and pay US$ 2,5 for any response than to set up an open source tool. Imagine if something goes wrong during the survey? Who will they be able to blame? A small open source developer community? The clients will laugh in their face. If they go for Confirmit or Questback and something goes wrong, they can at least say: we went with the market leader. Who would expect that they screw this up? But I am sure you know what I mean. If I would have proposed my managing director back in the day to go for Limesurvey, he would have considered me crazy. Even if most of our surveys back than would have worked more than fine.

I agree about not just listening to those that are power users and dominate the forum. Like always: there are so many users not involved in this forum, that we would not get a very good overview.

However, how to get to those users that are not coming here? Maybe via the auto-update, asking the admin to participate. But then this might be just an IT guy who is responsible for the tool running and has actually no idea what it is used for, etc.


Research should be done, but I am not sure that a simple survey will do any good.

Problem is probably also that it is very difficult to have a look into the professional tools. First of all, they usually don't have any "trial" access and second it takes a lot of time to understand what really is good or bad in a tool when you really use it.

So we users need to give this feedback. But I would rather like to have a "qualitative phase" before. Some chats in a group of interested users from different areas and with important developers. To see what is possible and what not.

I just feel that there are not enough resources for a really strategic move forward like with EM. There was someone who had the concept basically ready and was a full time employee to implement that (he probably had some other tasks, but there was a company paying him to implement EM into Limesurvey, from what I understand).

Like in many OS projects, things only move forward, when there are certain parties with a special interest in something, that put resources on it.

I am not informed about anything about development, but what makes me think is how many universities use Limesurvey around the world and how little I see universities contributing. Wouldn't it be a easy thing to teach students basics of programming and doing little projects in Limesurvey. Not that this will give a huge push because I guess one experienced programmer will help a lot more than 20 students trying to learn to program, but I feel that they could support Limesurvey better. But maybe this is just my impression.

And I don't see many people with a market research background here, that could help on explaining what is currently available on the market, what is missing in Limesurvey, etc.

Maybe it is not always heard either. But I can understand that the team has only a certain amount of resources available.

holch wrote: And I don't see many people with a market research background here, that could help on explaining what is currently available on the market, what is missing in Limesurvey, etc.

Not sure if he is writing here. But he is reading.
www.surveydesigners.com/tag/ls/

Yes, I know this website. Has some interesting stuff.