How can I collaborate on a survey?

Edit and Preview

Find the survey you want on your account dashboard. Click on the Preview button (as shown below) will open the Preview. (Tip: right-clicking the Preview button will open the Preview in a separate browser window for you.)

From the survey builder, you can also open the survey’s Preview by clicking on the icon in the top-right hand corner (as shown below).

Keep Two Windows Open - when editing a survey, we recommend that you keep two browser windows open side-by-side, one for the survey builder, the other for the Preview. That way, as you edit in the builder, you can frequently refresh the Preview window to see the latest changes.

The Preview consists of two parts. As shown above:

• The part on top has dark blue background. That part is shown only during Preview. The Edit button will show up only if the survey is still in draft mode, clicking on the Edit button will open the draft in the survey builder. The Share button always shows up, clicking on it will reveal the preview link, which you can share with other people.
• The lower part is exactly the same view that a survey taker sees when they take the survey.

Navigation Controls in Preview

Corresponding to the two-part layout of the Preview, there are two sets of navigation controls in Preview. The two sets of controls are for different purposes:

• Top-Navigation: the drop down menu and the arrows next to it in the top-right corner. This set of controls is for easy navigation by the survey designers and administrators. It is useful when editing and refining survey contents. When you click “refresh” button in the browser of the Preview, you’ll see the latest survey content in the Preview. Just flip to the page you are editing to check the content. This set of controls does not obey survey logic. This set of control is also not available to survey takers, they are shown solely in the Preview.
• Lower-Navigation: the CONTINUE button. This is the same control as survey takers will see when they take the survey. This way of navigation obeys survey logic. Actually, this is the only way you can test the survey logic.

Sharing Preview for Collaboration

To collaborate with your colleagues when you revise the survey’s content, just click the Preview’s Share button, and share the provided link with others to allow them to review your survey draft. Or, more directly, you can copy & paste the URL in the address bar of the browser when you view the Preview. Those two links are the same.

Anyone can view the Preview, Survature accounts are not required. That means you can conveniently involve a bigger team of colleagues than just those that have Survature accounts to help critique and provide feedback.

The Preview link is unlisted, which means only those with the link will be able to access the survey draft preview. For confidentiality reasons, the Preview link has redundancy encoding to prevent people from guessing what the preview link is. Unless you share the Preview link with people, the chances of externally breaching the link is very slim.

Interactions with the survey through the Preview link are not recorded as part of survey results. That makes Previewing a safe way to see the content of the survey at all times.

The Preview link is also valid throughout a survey’s entire life cycle, which spans from when the survey is being drafted, when the survey is running, and till after the survey has closed.

Finally, you may have a need to get the survey’s content into a Word document for a variety of reasons. The best way to do that is to use the Printer Friendly View. We have been really surprised by how popular that feature is.

Other Collaborations

To collaborate during survey analytics stage, please refer to our helpful Share Analytics help page.

To collaboratively edit the survey in the survey builder, please refer to the Group Settings help-doc and contact our user support to set up group-based editing.

Caution: when you use multiple computers to do your work, if you have the same survey opened in the builder via multiple web browsers (through the same Survature account), there is a risk of your browsers over-writing each other because Survature’s survey builder performs auto-save and also that the Survature platform has to assume it’s the same user writing to the same survey. The potential racing condition can cause editing results to be undefined, and the survey may be rendered usable. Thankfully, the fix is simple. Just copy the broken survey to a new survey. The copy process ensures data consistency. You can open the newly copied survey in a builder via just one browser and edit from there.

Previewing Inventory Surveys

Inventory surveys listed under Survature Examples can be previewed as well. The only difference is that the Preview does not provide the Edit button, nor the Share button. Instead you get a Copy button which will copy the inventory survey to your account page. After that, you own the copied survey.

The navigation controls when previewing an inventory survey behave in the same way as in other situations. Here is a screen capture of an inventory survey under preview.