Voxco Online

Lots of built-in features that allows programmers to create questions with the best practices of survey methodologists

Voxco’s help documentation is a joke. The company doesn’t seem to want to fix the quirky flaw that requires users to use two different sets of logical operators for programing skip or display logic. It is NOT user friendly where they have to remember to switch to a different grammar when they need to use advanced mode.

The description of all help documentation is only for tech savvy users, not written in layman’s terms. Even when I suggested this to the sales rep at conference booth, they just said this is due to a different development mindset. OMG, it’s customers’s responsibility to learn Voxco’s logic!!!

Also, Qualtrics has developed so many built-in options for validation, like recapcha. Voxco doesn’t seem to do more to appeal to the users that love Voxco for the rigor.

I am not involved in survey development, but the graduate student who are seem to be able to use it easily enough.

I have a serious issue with it's data retention. Everything is stored unencrypted in the database, so personally identifiable information is natively protected. So the second part comes from a recent experience of ours where one of our researchers discovered that some of our imported data was going missing. I tracked down the specific cases, and opened a Voxco support ticket. They are very responsive, but their immediate answer was that they couldn't be causing it. More digging, more logs, and I presented the exact URLs that were being used to access the surveys, showing them where the data was being lost. Again, this couldn't possibly be them and it had to be due to the University's network or something because all the cases were from the same IPs (since students were testing it in our offices). So I log into the Voxco web server and get the IIS logs showing them the data showing up and that it was indeed their software losing the data. They denied their own server logs. After getting the sales rep added on to the ticket, I got an apology email about 30 minutes later stating that it was indeed Voxco losing our imported data, and that we needed an update. So digging into the updates, we were on version 28 (simplified number) and the current version was 71. There had been 30 updates since they had last touched our system. After inquiring about this, they only do these minor update versions to your system if you report an issue that one of these fixes. Nice job...

I think the best feature of this software is the user friendliness of the programming system. It is very intuitive and does not take advanced programming knowledge to use, but it still has the options to do a lot more complex programming and manipulation than you would get out of other systems at the same lavel of user friendliness.

I think it would be helpful if Voxco had more support available around the area of accessability and someone that could work with us specially on proramming surveys that are more accesabile.