How adNucleus manages surveys and their responses in combination with SurveyJS

Initial situation

Excel has been used for many years because of its simplicity and features: essentially a blank page with a grid, which allows you to structure data in rows and columns (two-dimensional table). One typical use case is to define a structure in Excel, send it to the recipients, who then fill in the responses and send them back for analysis.

In this case, several well-known problems arise:

• How do you consolidate a large number of responses?
• How can you ensure the responses use the same format?
• How can this be done efficiently?

For example:

• A user modifies the Excel template, such as the data structure, and adapts the cells to their answers
• Once the responses have been collected, they must be merged into a single file with the same format
• Once the data has been aggregated, Excel reports and/or charts need to be represented within statistics or key performance indicators (KPIs)

In order to handle this task, it is common to use Excel for data communication, for example via e-mail. More directly related to our topic, there are several survey services available online, such as Google Forms or SurveyMonkey. These are easy to use and convenient when dealing with small questionnaires, as well as completely independent of the organisation or client concerned.

This presents difficulties when:

• Designing the questionnaire (user-friendliness, complex and/or conditional questions)
• We want to compare the data centrally and in a single interface
• Using information from an internal database

Our solution

More and more clients are running their applications or services in the cloud, rather than on a physical server located on the company’s site. The infrastructure is cost-effective, easily managed remotely and includes all the services necessary for a high level of availability and backup.

This approach allows for new ways of solving the problem mentioned, and many more besides. Collecting data from users outside an organisation is another challenge that needs to be addressed.

adesso has found a solution for its customers that successfully deals with this issue. By creating two applications and a database, hosted on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud, both the business and technical needs can be met.

Here’s how it works

The client’s internal staff use a dedicated application to manage the survey campaigns, while external contacts access another application, containing a limited set of features.

This configuration allows a good level of security without making it too complex. The cost of the entire infrastructure* is affordable and allows for scaling.

*= Load balancer, web servers, database, attachments, backups

More about adNucleus

These applications were built with an internal adesso framework, adNucleus. This is a so-called sandbox framework that uses open-source technology, although it is not open-source itself (proprietary source).

adNucleus is a Java Spring/Angular ecosystem. It brings together multiple common features such as authentication, data model mapping, a query engine, a web front-end and so on. Once assembled, this block acts as the shell/core of the application. The functionalities related to the client’s business are integrated into this shell and shape the final product.

With over 10 years of service and experience with clients, adNucleus offers a ready-to-use application shell with powerful features. Some of these features are included by default in every application built, while others are optional depending on clients’ needs.

All our clients benefit from the experience we have gained over the years, testing the concepts and building on them over time.

SurveyJS integration

We chose to integrate an existing tool, SurveyJS – after all, there is no point reinventing the wheel. SurveyJS is a JavaScript library developed by devsoftbaltic. It offers multiple features such as a main library, a questionnaire creator, PDF export of the questionnaire and a response analysis package.

The integration of SurveyJS in adNucleus fully addresses the various issues mentioned:

• Designing questionnaire templates (SurveyJS Creator)
• Managing questionnaire campaigns (adNucleus)

  • Defining the destination with an e-mail
  • Grouping multiple responses from the same questionnaire
  • Visualising individual and overall progress
• Campaign reporting (SurveyJS PDF Export, SurveyJS Analytics Pack, adNucleus)
• Linking different data sources (adNucleus)
• Using internal client data in the questionnaire, such as a list of users or business data.

Our conclusion

Our adNucleus framework allows us to quickly create and present a prototype of an application in the cloud or hosted on site. Our adNucleus prototypes are ready to be deployed in production, with all the elements of a final application already present.

SurveyJS makes it possible to design a survey questionnaire with a user-friendly interface and offers a specific, ready-to-use mode for responding to the questionnaire once it has been designed.

Integrating SurveyJS in adNucleus provides a compelling and flexible solution for managing survey design, survey campaigns, as well as response reporting and analysis.

In a low-code context, another use case for this library could be designing user interfaces. With little code and in combination with adNucleus, this configuration could provide a new application skeleton even faster.