SBIR-STTR Award

The principal objectives of this SBIR proposal are to design, code and market a computer software system permitting users of Java-enabled desktop computers to create professionally sophisticated questionnaires for on-line surveying via the World Wide Web. Innovative features include a platform-neutral questionnaire editing and data collection system, a graphical user interface enabling the design and editing of complex, WYSIWYG questionnaires, professional design features incorporating complex skips, on-the-fly calculations and dynamically embedded fills in the wording of questions and responses, a multilingual questionnaire editor based on Unicode, coupled with a server-side application to decrypt, analyze and publish statistical and graphical results to any location on the World Wide Web. Specific goals of this Phase I proposal include: (1) specifying program features, behaviors and controls, (2) defining objects and data structure of the questionnaire file, 3) designing menus, dialog windows and warning dialog schematics, 4) creating Java components for testing and validating key system elements and 5) drafting a preliminary user manual and Help file. This product has enormous commercial potential since it meets the growing needs of organizations involved in the systematic surveying of customers, employees and clients via desktop or Kiosks Internet computers worldwide. PROPOSED COMMERCIAL APPLICATIONS: The proposed project will create a platform-independent software package for surveying respondents over the global Internet and corporate Intranets. In addition to its immediate use by social scientists and market researchers, schools, govt. agencies and corporate offices can use this system to evaluate classroom training, gauge audience response, gather program treatment data, as well as measure levels of customer and client satisfaction.

The application's objective is completion of the design, coding and marketing of the AskAnywhere web-based survey system. The system consists of three components: a questionnaire editing application, a client-side data collection applet, and a communication and data processing server program. These three components work on all computers running Java Virtual Machines. The questionnaire editing application has a straightforward graphical user interface easing the design and editing of complex, WYSIWYG questionnaires. The questionnaire editor simplifies the "programming" of questionnaires, which include complex skips, dynamic calculations and embedded fills in the wording of questions and responses. Questionnaires can be written in any modern language since all files are stored as Unicode. The survey engine, a Java applet downloaded to the respondent's machine at the time of the survey, offers both respondents and survey administrators a secure, robust protocol for web-based data collection. The web-server program offers session tracking, data decryption, maintains real-time links between the questionnaire and a JDBC compliant database and offers automatic statistical analysis and charting via the web. To further assist social and health scientists, and survey researchers everywhere, a bank of widely used questions and questionnaires will be compiled and integrated. The editor will import and export questionnaire files in a wide variety of cross-application formats. PROPOSED COMMERCIAL APPLICATION: Social and health scientists, educators and market researchers seeking powerful surveying tools capable writing and importing questionnaires from a variety of sources will be attracted to AskAnywhere's editing options, questionnaire ecumenicity, and multilingual capabilities. Market analyst and corporate survey researchers will appreciate AskAnywhere's multi-tier, highly scalable design in which corporate legacy databases can be incorporated into data collection efforts.