Factile, as you know, is a free and open source survey platform. It generated significant interest in the first few days of its launch and I received some feedback that I thought would be good to build into the tool. I have just released a new version at http://www.factile.net and the following are the main changes:

  1. Better Navigation: Clickable bars showing the steps in survey creation/ editing to enhance user experience.

  2. Offline Survey Capability: Even if the survey participants are in transit or are in areas of unreliable connectivity, they can still ‘work offline’. i.e. They can keep on working through the survey and just submit the results once they are back on the network! Easy-peasy !

  3. Word Clouds: Factile now has the capability to build a word cloud (aka tag cloud) of free text responses. Factile combines all responses for free text questions, removes common words (aka stop words) and generates a word cloud. Just so you can analyse survey takers’ comments much more easily.

  4. Insights: This is a feature that was always planned and was delayed. You can now select a group of questions and define constraints to generate a list of top 5 combinations as picked by the users. So for example, if you wanted to see what demographic group tweets/ blogs the most, you could comine the demographics related questions, add a constraint around tweeting/ blogging and get sorted and aggregated insights.

  5. Custom URI: Would you like your survey to be called http://www.factile.net/mycoolsurvey instead of the long system generated identifier? You can do so now!

Obviously, Factile is freely downloadable and customizable (and these surveys work on mobile devices, as would be convenient to use on a mobile device and not as small difficult to click HTML radio buttons).

You can let me know if you want a feature/ faced a bug by logging an issue on github, or just leave a comment on this blog! You can also send an email at https://groups.google.com/group/factile.

I did a quick video on the use of Factile a week or so back and uploaded to YouTube. You can watch it here.