New Web App - thoughts???

I've developed a new web app for creating online surveys and was wondering if anyone would like to give me some feed back on it.

The application is online at:
http://aphion.com/dev/survey/login.php

Username = demouser
Password = demopass

I'm pretty much done with adding features (for v1 rollout) and am working on refining some of the presentation (HTML / CSS work) layer.

I would really appreciate any feed back on any of the following:

1) usability - does the admin interface seem user friendly? What could be done to make it better?

2) accessibility - The surveys themselves are fairly 508 compliant, and so too is the admin interface, but I'm sure I'm missing something

3) Overall impression - what are your thoughts? Is this a decent product or should I go back to the drawing board.

Thanks for your input.

I like the product, but here's the first things that I've noticed...
1) When you're making a survey, you can't (at least not easily) set the options for a question which is a checklist.. Perhaps this pops up later in the process, but I think it would be more usable if the user was to provide the options at the same time as the questions.
2) The colour scheme seems very all-over-the-show, lose the green entirely.
3) You have used <strong> and <span> for headers, not cool for 508..

<span class="title">Survey Manager</span> :eek: :eeK:
<strong>Add a answer</strong>
**in fact, I can't find a single header element in your site.. There's no way that's a good accessibility practice, even if you're sure your user base won't include those using assistive technologies.
4) The pages are very cluttered vertically. Add more margin to the <hr />'s, and while you're at it, get rid of suspect padding techniques like this one:

<p>To change question categories, you must have access to the 'Question Groups' area.</p><br /><hr />
5) I'd put "View Survey", "View Results", et all into the left column, leaving the entire space to be occupied by the survey's location.

Good points. Your comment about adding options to the questions is a good point that I hadn't considered. Perhaps after adding a question, rather than going to another "Add a question" page, I should redirect the user to add options (if they selected a questions that requires it)???

Actually, I don't know what I was posting earlier, I meant to say that the Admin interface isn't as 508 complaint as the surveys. I've concentrated those efforts on the survey generated by the system more so than the admin portion. Your points are well taken.

About the color scheme, that's what I'm going to be working on in the admin interface. As you say, it uses tables for layout and such along with other problems. I'm going to work on recoding to use lists for navigational componants. At the same time, I'm going to try to come up with a professional color scheme, probably a blue / silver / orange / white combo or something similar.

Additional comments are appreciated. I'm particularly interested in whether anyone thinks there's a market for this type of application.

Depending on how well the end forms could be styled, I think I'd use the surveys for online beta-testing :)

As for colour scheme, I just ran into a list of tools that would be perfect for you: http://kay.smoljak.com/archives/?color-scheming
This one (http://slayeroffice.com/tools/color_palette/) could be perfect for a really clean, simple colour scheme.

Thanks for the links. One of the modules I'm working on for the admin interface is a theme module which will allow the survey creator to style all the elements on their survey, and include a logo for corporate branding. I think that will be a big feature to add.

I'm shooting for a formal release date sometime in Mid June and hope to offer both monthly subscriptions and complete download / installation / support packages. Hopefully I can recoupe some of the cost (read time) I've put into this! :D

Anyway, thanks for the opinions. Any more from any one?

Well, I popped this on my server at home for some more dev work and started working on recoding the presentation (HTML / CSS). Let me know what you think of this for an interface. I tried to make the HTML more semantic and used header, lists, tables where appropriate. I think I'm getting there, but there's still some work to do.

Here's the link to the system...

http://66.41.118.200/~bcarl314/dev/survey/login.php

Same username / passwd combo (demouser / demopass)

And here's a link to a survey...

http://66.41.118.200/~bcarl314/dev/survey.php?id=3

Let me know if this is an improvement and what you would change.

looking very good ,
1 thing that would get to me is when say creating multple choice questions for checkboxes etc , it would be nice to give multiple answer options at once , via multiple inputs or delimited input , else it can take a very long time to create the survey ?

again , looking good.

Yeah, that seems to be a tough problem to solve. I was actually thinking about that when I started and had a long conversation with my self (yes I talk to myself often, I'm the only person crazy enough to listen to me :D )

I thought about adding the fields for answers, but then I thought "Well, how many fields should I add? 5, 10, 15???". So that was when I decided to change the answer editing to it's own routine. Although, I suppose I could go back now and program it with a default of 5 options, then allow them to add more in the answer editing area. Hmmm. Of course, then you've got the whole wasting form fields if your selecting a text response type question. Not that thats a big deal, just one of those things where I hate to show form fields that have the potential to do nothing.

Hmmm.

Anybody else with some more input?