Yesterday, I stuck with most of the defaults in my test of Opinio polls, and I had some success. I did run into a few problems, which I will describe below. I’m not sure how savvy my readers are (are you out there?), but I’m always left wondering how software designers come up with some of their management interfaces. I’m used to digging through new software and figuring things out — and even I get lost. (This isn’t a stab at Opinio – I find this with just about EVERY piece of software I use. Baffling, baffling UI sometimes.)

Onto my follow-up with polls…

Changing the Chart

This one stumped me for a while, and the help really didn’t help me here. Some background: the poll results can be set to display in chart format. The default is a horizontal bar chart, but you can also pick from a vertical bar chart and a pie chart. My problem was that the default settings were not sufficient — one of my questions got sort of cut off in the results (couldn’t see the whole answer text, and couldn’t see ANY results). I thought maybe a different chart would help (which it did – I’ll get into that later).

I was in the "Set Poll Behaviour" screen, where you set the Result type to be "Chart" or "Thank you note". I also wanted to see the options for the chart, but didn’t see them on this screen. I clicked the cute little green question mark bubble. Here, I find reference to "Quick Chart Edit" – sounds promising! Click on that link, which shows me what I’m looking for… but… wait… how do I get there? I look in the menu, no reference to "Quick Chart Edit". No description in the help page for how to find this elusive tool. Commence hair pulling.

After a little back & forth, I decided to move on… and magically found the option. See, you need to be in the "Customize Look & Feel", or simply "Look & Feel" menu group in order to see the "Quick poll chart edit" option. Yikes. Seriously?

Quick Recap: Customize look and feel > Quick poll chart edit will allow you to make some simple, but useful changes to your results chart.

Chart Layout (or, how to actually see all of your stuff)

OK, so now that I’ve found it… why did I need it in the first place? Ah, yes… because things weren’t displaying properly. At first I thought it had something to do with the system I posted it on (which happened to be this blog, in what is currently Roller blog software). I soon realized that the same behaviour was happening in the preview right in Opinio.

In my example, I have two questions. The first is a multiple choice with three possible answers, one of which is rather long ("I have an account, but rarely/never use it."). Both questions appear on the first screen (don’t love the layout or spacing of the questions, but at least it works). Select your answers, and click ‘Vote’. The results, by default, appear in a "Horizontal Bar Chart". My second question results display as expected — but not the first. To start, the text for answer option 3 (the long one) gets cut off. Even worse, no results appear for this question. Frustrating!! Let’s start with the bigger problem…

a) Getting all results to display – widen both the table & the chart

I actually started by changing the chart type – first to vertical bar, then to pie. The vertical bar was the only one that showed the results to both questions without any further editing. The pie chart seemed to suffer from the same affliction as the horizontal bar chart. I realized that the wee box displaying the poll was simply not wide enough to accommodate my results.

click Customize Look & Feel to widen the poll table

Here, you can pick other box styles (and Advanced will allow you to play with the CSS… I’ll definitely be exploring this soon!). You can also change the  "Form Width", which is what I did. You may have to play with this a little to get the right width for your poll & the page you are delivering it on.

From inside the Customize Look & Feel menu, click Quick poll chart edit to widen the poll results chart itself

Here is where you can choose from the various chart options – I’d do this before playing with the width of the chart – and set the "Chart Width".

Click ‘Preview poll’ in the left-hand menu bar at any time to view your poll.

Where Do I Use this?

After you go through all of the steps in preparing your poll, click "Publish Poll" to get the couple of lines of code needed to add the poll to a web page. We’re still testing the deployment out in different systems, but have had success in adding them to Serena Collage sites and Roller blogs. A quick test of our test WordPress site did not give us good results, but there are a few factors which we can control that we’ll play with to see if we can get it working. We’ve also had some trouble adding polls to Blackboard courses. Basically, any system that relies heavily on Javascript may not allow you to add things like these polls. Some sites prevent users from posting Javascript for security reasons. These are all things that you need to take into account when deciding to use these tools.

OK, so that was a pretty dry post for today. Sorry, but I thought I’d post something useful for once. I hope to bring the song & dance back soon!

Venturing into new territory… poll/survey software.

Granted, this isn’t the most "Web 2.0" stuff… but I’m learning about it. Today, I’m going to look specifically at the polling features. I took a quick peek a week or so ago, and found it pretty easy to set up a default poll – but some of the options were worded pretty strangely. I’m going to use this blog entry to demystify some of them.

First: Remember to look in the left-hand toolbar to figure out what to do next. I managed to create a new poll, but started scratching my head about what to do next. Left-hand bar "Guide" section has a link to "Create Questions".

Label Position: I had to read this a couple of times before I had it figured out. When making web pages, a ‘label’ might refer to a piece of text that goes along with a text field or something. In this case, things seem to be confused. The option is called "Label Position", but the options all refer to "button left", "button right", etc. The "button" in this case is the radio button (in the case of a multiple choice question). I want the radio button to appear to the left of the text (label?), so I chose "button left". (If you pick the position of the button, rather than that of the label, shouldn’t the option be called Button Position?)

Answer Rotation: I’m pretty sure this refers to randomizing the answers, so they don’t appear in the same order for every person taking the poll.

Help!: OK, so I just noticed the little green questionmark icon guy. It’s meant to give you some contextual help for whichever screen you happen to be on. You can probably disregard most of this post, since it’s probably all answered in The Emerald City.

May 26 Update: a few points that you may need to know

• Firefox/Roller Bug? – If you embed a poll in a Roller blog post, you won’t be able to edit the post in Firefox. You’ll need to use Internet Explorer. (Weird, I know…). I would actually recommend putting the poll in its own post, and put other next in a second post (so you can edit the text part on its own and not worry about it too much)
• IF YOU CAN’T GET THE POLL TO WORK: i.e. you embed the code, but you only see the last screen, it may mean that your poll has past the specified ‘end date’. By default, Opinio sets it as a week – be sure to set it to something appropriate for your project. After the fact This is can be changed by going to "Poll Home", and clicking on the "Stop Date" to change it. (See the next point for the next step.)
• Your poll may be locked – go to "Poll Home" if the traffic light is red, your poll is locked."Click to unlock poll". This will happen if your poll end date has passed – even after changing the date, you will have to unlock the poll in order to have people take it again. 

 Here is my sample poll: