👶 How it Began

... can be skipped if boring ...

I started this project in March/April 2020 while preparing the first ever digital semester for the course "Introduction to Arduino Programming". We planned on using a small survey to find out how many of our students would be living in Munich during this semester and how many participants we could expect to join the course in total. This data was required so we could order enough Arduino kits and possibly send them to students who were not able to pick them up in person 🤖

To verify a survey submission, one student had to verify his "...@mytum.de" email address. Every TUM student has exactly one of these addresses.

I looked at existing survey tools and noticed that none of the major ones (Typeform, SurveyMonkey, etc.) supports email verification of a survey submission, let alone emails with a special format (@mytum). They still don't support this.

In addition to that, most of them are kind of a black box when it comes to handling submission data and are rather pricey - a required monthly fee of 20 to 35 dollars even with no active surveys 💸

🤷 Why yet another survey tool?

The existing solutions are ...

overly complicated to use even for easy surveys
black boxes when it comes to handling data - not good for data privacy
pricey since almost all of them charge a monthly fee of 20 to 35 dollars

Our approach is to ...

focus on the important stuff and keep the UX/UI simple
be fully open source and encrypt all submission data at rest in the future
use pay as you go pricing per survey submission - no survey = zero cost

🛠️ Core concepts

Decoupled frontend and backend: This is a no brainer for modern data driven applications.

The survey itself (questions, deadline, etc.) is stored as a JSON configuration file. An example can be found here: https://docs.fastsurvey.io/docs/user-guide/json-configuration-files.

The service consists of three main parts: backend, admin-frontend (configuring surveys) and survey-frontend (filling out surveys). I am developing all frontend parts of survey and Felix is working on all backend aspects and a concise API.

I don't want to make you fall asleep with a long technical description of FastSurvey - only if you want me to 😉

If you want to be part of the beta, please contact me via moritz@dostuffthatmatters.dev.

You can find a few impressions of our product below 🚀

Neat right? No 😬 This was just the first version of the survey editor.

The exact same editor just with a bit of redesign 🙌

project image: A ton of redesign later, I decided to ditch the double sidebar. This is the editor design we launched with. Really the whole experience has been iterated over many times - just check it out on fastsurvey.de 😉

A ton of redesign later, I decided to ditch the double sidebar. This is the editor design we launched with. Really the whole experience has been iterated over many times - just check it out on fastsurvey.de 😉

Collapsing fields for a better overview

Since all survey configs are JSON files, implementing copy and paste was a piece of cake 🍰

Adding new fields is also done by simply adding a text-template into the survey config.

A very early version of the frontend - experiments with only showing one field at once.

A word on this last video.

Traditional survey tools display all/many fields on one page. A few modern tools use this field by field focus. I am by no means a UX designer these are just my personal thoughts.

The pros of this field by field approach:

Clean look and focus on one field at a time
Even when there are a lot of questions the survey doesn't scare away people - nothing unsexier that a page full of empty fields to fill out

The cons:

Giving feedback on which fields are missing/invalid is more complex
Navigating the form is harder - maybe one wants to skip a field at first

By now I have decided that it is best to show all fields at once for now. In future versions we could possibly group "pages" of fields.

project image: There is a results summary. Option, Radio and Selection field can be aggregated (all votes counted together). In a few weeks we will also launch a raw data download, where users can download all individual submissions of their surveys. We will probably offer JSON, CSV and PARQUET.

There is a results summary. Option, Radio and Selection field can be aggregated (all votes counted together). In a few weeks we will also launch a raw data download, where users can download all individual submissions of their surveys. We will probably offer JSON, CSV and PARQUET.