How do you like.. use this?

Qwk.io is incredibly simple:

  1. Create your survey with the world's simplest markup. It takes just a couple of minutes. It looks like a survey.
  2. You will get two links: a public link where people can take the survey, and a private link where you can view responses. Distribute the public link to people you would like to respond. Keep the private link secret, unless you want everyone to see all of the responses, in which case we're fine if you send it out.
  3. Survey creation, responses, and result downloads are completely free, with no subscriptions or payment required.

Survey Advice

We built Qwk.io because we needed something like it. So we've had some experience with surveys, and we've done things right and we've done things wrong. Here's some general advice based on our experience:

  • Use number ranges in radio buttons rather than single line text to collect numeric responses. Odds are you're going to want to group responses into ranges anyway, and it's easier to process the results if people are selecting “six to ten” rather than writing in “7”, “nine”, “6”, and “eihgt” [sic].
  • Arrange answers in a consistent manner. Either arrange answers alphabetically or in ascending numerical order, or arrange them by some other logical order like distance or month. But be consistant, as much as possible.
  • Avoid leading questions or leading answers. If you find yourself writing “Don't you think that…”, you've gone astray. Likewise, if your ratings are “Terrible”, “Poor”, “Fair”, “Good”, and “Excellent!!!!!!!”, you may be skewing your results.

Markup

Qwk.io supports single choice, multiple choice, rating, single line text, and multiple line text questions.

Advanced Usage: Directives

Directives configure the entire survey. Put them at the very beginning of the survey, before its title. Directive names start with an @ sign.

You can have Qwk.io automatically close a survey after a duration:

@expires 7 days

Team Lunch Survey

Minutes and hours work too:

@expires 30 minutes
@expires 12 hours

Use only one @expires line in a survey. You can also provide a specific ISO date or timestamp:

@expires 2030-09-30
@expires 2030-09-30T17:00:00-07:00

A date without a time expires at the end of that date in UTC. Relative durations begin when the survey is created. Expiration cannot be changed or reversed, but the private results link and all downloads continue working after a survey expires.

Single Choice

When you want to ask a user to choose between two or more options, and only want one answer, single choice is the way to go. Qwk.io can render single choice questions as either a series of radio buttons or as a dropdown box. Both get you the same data, only the presentation is different.

Radio Buttons are created like this:

( ) Choice One
( ) Choice Two
( ) Choice Three

…and you can continue on from there to as many choices as you like. It might not be a bad idea to include a "None" option as well, since radio buttons cannot be unchecked once they're selected. Qwk.io will never do this for you, since your survey is your business.

But what if you don't like the way it looks when there are 30 options to choose from, so the user might have to scroll back up to see the question by the time they're read all the options? Well, that's when to use a dropdown.

Dropdowns are created like this:

< > Choice One
< > Choice Two
< > Choice Three

Multiple Choice

Multiple choice questions allow a user to pick zero or more answers from a predefined list. Qwk.io implements multiple choice questions as checkboxes; you can create them like this:

[ ] Choice 1
[ ] Choice 2
[ ] Choice 3

Note that users can select anywhere from zero to every choice listed; Qwk.io does not support requiring an answer or limiting a user to at most N answers (but hey, if that's a feature you want, by all means let us know).

Single Line Text

This is pretty self explanatory – if you want a user to write in a short response without having predefined options, the single line is for you. This is ideal for open ended number questions or questions where you're pretty sure just a few words will suffice. You create single line text questions with three or more underscore characters, like this:

How many times have you used our service?
___

…or like this:

How many times have you used our service?
_____________________________

Multiple Line Text

When you want to collect a response that's likely to be longer than fits in a single line text, use the multiple line text (aka Textbox) answer type. It allows users to type arbitrarily long answers – they can write a book in that thing if they are so inclined. You can create a multiple line text answer by putting three underscores on two consecutive lines, like so:

What else could we do to improve the service?
___
___

Point Ratings

Point ratings let participants select a number on a scale. Include between three and ten numbered choices:

How easy was this survey?
(1) (2) (3) (4) (5)