LibSurveys Update Now Live

We’ve rolled out an update for LibSurveys, and we have lots of new features to share with you!

New Form & Survey Builder

We’re delighted to share our revamped builder, which we’ve dubbed the Form and Survey Workpad. With the previous builder, we know that managing forms and surveys that contain many questions could become unwieldy. After several trips to the drawing board, we’ve hit on an approach that we think you’ll enjoy – rather than displaying a full live preview, we’re adopting a tile approach where each question is its own tile. Check it out:

As you’ll see above, each tile represents one of the questions in your form or survey. Reordering questions is still a simple drag and drop process, but with this more compact layout, reordering loooong lists of questions becomes much more fluid. Double click on a tile to open the question pane, where you’ll find the wysiwyg question preview and settings pane.

More New Features

• Bootstrap – We’ve updated the look and feel of forms and surveys – they’re now bootstrapped and fully responsive, so they’ll look great on any device.
• Updated Settings – We’ve tweaked the default settings for new Forms and Surveys to provide a cleaner, more responsive layout right from the get go.
• Welcome and Thank You screens – We’ve added rich text enabled pages for “Welcome” and “Thank You” messages, so you can add an introductory and/or closing message for your forms and surveys! Just click on the “Welcome” or “Thank You” areas in the Workpad, and you’ll see a rich text editor pop up. Add images, edit fonts, change colors, insert tables, and add any other rich text content you’d like to make a great first or last impression.
• Multi-Column Answer Display – Radio and Checkbox field responses can now be displayed in a 1, 2, or 3-column layout. This multiple column option is great for when you have a question with lots of possible answers and want more control over how those answers display.

Spam Control

LibSurveys already includes many spam prevention features, but for those who’d like a little extra protection against the forces of spam, we’ve added an enhanced Spam Control option to the new Welcome screen. We’re not huge fans of Captcha as it makes submitting a form harder on end-users, so after some research we’ve implemented a method that makes life harder for spammers yet keeps things easy for end-users.

Here’s how it works: when you enable enhanced Spam Control, we’ll add a new, hidden text field to your LibSurvey. This field must remain blank in order to submit the form. The idea is that when spammers target forms, they generally fill out all fields that are presented (assuming that some fields may be required, etc.), but in this case, filling out this particular field will prevent the LibSurvey from being submitted. For folks accessing your LibSurvey using assistive devices, they’ll see the field presented with clear warning language indicating the field shouldn’t be filled out. End result? Spammers are denied access, and end-users can submit forms with a minimum of friction. Awesome!