questfox Domain simplification
Posted: 2. February 2022 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: app.questfox.com, Domain Leave a commentThe Internet comes with some update challenges we are trying to cope with by offering some simple subdomains to you. We try to keep website, updates and the tool itself technically apart.
Access to questfox for registered users: app.questfox.com brings you to the software itself
The updated website can be reached via web.questfox.com or right away under https://questfox.online
This news update is always can be reached under News brings you to this external update site.
questfox mission Speech in Research for iOS completed #questfox FeatureAlert
Posted: 24. April 2021 Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Apple, feature, iOS, questfox, real voice of the customer, Research, Speech Leave a comment
Speech questionnaires with Apple iOS devices now available in questfox.
Since 2017 we already offer speech interviews on mobile or desktop devices powered by questfox. In 2019 we were awarded with the Best Practice Award from the German Society for Online Market Research (DGOF) for our study comparing the input of classic type-in keyboard input vs. voice input and video input with transciption of the speech. The study was one of its kind and a breakthrough in innovative online research.
But two years ago – for the first time in years – we were not able to follow our basic “device agnostic” paradigm as it was not possible to use these crazy new speech features on all devices available. The market driven fight between major players of the IT industry makes it necessary to cope with different approaches of technology.
Finally our fantastic development team made it happen. We are proud to offer the questfox feature set for speech in research questionnaires now to the Apple/iOS universe too.
Decision makers run on Apple devices
Even though the Apple world is a minor group in terms of market share and representativeness in market research, most of the decision makers run on Apple phones. These were the sceptical people not believing in our technology as we could not offer it to them. Hope to prove you wrong one more time.
The only excuse now left to not use speech questionnaires in research powered by questfox is a missing willing to innovate. All innovators are invited to work with us on new forms of research. The tech base is just the fundament to build new interactions in research far beyond the classic Likert scale.
Constant battle to innovate in research
The next battle we will be fighting in this field is to make change happen. A new paradigm of social interaction is available now. We are looking for totally different ways of asking questions. Leaving technology barriers behind now we are exploring new horizons.
All existing achievements of questfox are now available on some more millions of devices.
The 120 languages covered by questfox can now be used on iphones and Mac computers in Safari too. We will now be testing the settings where speech is still not possible and report on this. For sure there will be incompatibilities with older systems and older browers. But time is on our side….
Please update to the latest iOS 14 to be up to date for security reasons and to be able to participate in studies with voice. The new questfox features from covid year 2021 are probalby not working on Windows 95 and Internet Explorer. So please do not ask us if we can time travel to support stuff you should have updated long time ago. This is the time for change. So please also adopt and let us talk how we can change the world to make it a better place.
Why Speech in Research?
We believe (and can prove with data) that this technology opens the door to new kinds of research. Quant research will now be able to integrate more qualitative input. More data can be captured in less time. This is a way into sustainable research we definitively need.
More to read from the questfox team
WaveNet Text-to-Speech integrated into questfox
questfox Special Vocabulary Training for Speech2Text with new OOV feature
Speech2Text in questfox #time #confidencescore #realvoiceofthecustomer
Client’s SFTP Server integration for audio files
#questfox feature alert: Client’s SFTP Server integration for audio and video files
Posted: 1. November 2020 Filed under: Multimedia Insights | Tags: Audio, FTP, SFTP, transcription, Video 2 CommentsWe are very proud of the questfox development in speech. It is possible to record someones voice and to transcribe what the person said into text.
With more than 120 languages integrated, we are perhaps the leading tool for this kind of feature in market research.
As more and more users were saving thousands of answers on our servers we constantly discussed this feature set for security and performance reasons.
Saving Audio and Video Files outside of questfox
The idea of questfox speech tools is to receive the content said as a transcribed text. On top of this procedure questfox allows to save the recorded voices. The default setting for recording audio is OFF. So you need to switch ON this feature if you want to use it and later listen to the audio files.
To record the audio files you can switch the answer settings of an audio question type to ON.


The multimedia files used to be saved independently from the answers on the questfox server in a special folder structure.
In this setting we could not prevent that project admins of a project space could listen to the audios of other projects in the same project space.
In projects with thousands of audio files we had to admit, that performance of data handling in gigabytes became an issue in the browser. With the new approach this is over. You can decide where to save your data and you will have much quicker access as you can use your established tools to work with these multimedia files.
Security by Design with SFTP

Multimedia Files are now saved on the client’s side via SFTP
We now changed this forever and fulfill an important demand of our clients who always ask: Where is the data stored? From now on the answer will always be the same: The multimedia files are saved in your own security environment and not be in connection with the rest of the survey.
The recorded answer can be saved in your own environment and therefore out of everyone’s reach, using questfox. This is a major improvement in the field of data security as the multimedia data is now stored on the client’s side.
Important Notice: Make sure, that you have a user’s allowance to record his or her voice or video before saving this very personal information somewhere on the internet. This was a requirement before this new technology was implemented and still needs to be respected.
questfox is not responsible for your behavior and not reliable for your actions with our software. So please take data protection issues serious – especially in this very delicate field.
How to integrate your SFTP Server into questfox
Under CREATE – Projects Settings you will find a place to integrate your SFTP Settings.


Your password will never show-up in questfox and cannot be copied from the data input file.

When pressing the Connection Test button you should receive the following message when all input data is correct.

questfox settings for optional audio recording on your own SFTP Server
Organize your data following your needs
The data can be organized by three different settings: Question, Calendar Week or Participant. We advise you to do this only once per project to avoid confusion in the data structure.

Default is the organisation by question. Saving a single file would create a folder called “questfox” on your SFTP Server with a subfolder carrying the project ID and more subfolders named Q1 .. Qn with your multimedia data.

If you wish to organize the folder structure differently you can switch to “Order by Calender Week” and see the result later as “44-2020” which is the 44th week of the year 2020.

If you plan to look at the answers of one person you can organize the folder structure by “Participant”. questfox would create one folder for each individual and ad the answers to one question in this folder organized by question number (here Q1 and Q2).

And by the way: We updated to the most recent versions of transcription services. So the overall quality should become always better.
We wish you all the best with this new security feature which gives you the full power to manage sensitive data on your side. The flexibility of this approach will be important for complex projects.
FLAC – Free Lossless Audio Codec
In order to be independent from any kind of manufacturer we opted for the FLAC Codec to save in perfect nearly lossless quality.
For understanding this codec better we recommend this link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLAC
In case your Audio-Tool is not able to play this data we recommend the VNC Player which can be used entirely free of charge. Download available here: https://en.vlc.de/
#Gurkensalat: Historical innovation in market research with questfox
Posted: 11. June 2018 Filed under: Multimedia Insights, Speech2Text | Tags: Gurkensalat Leave a comment“Das Pferd frisst keinen Gurkensalat.”
Translation: “The horse does not eat cucumber salad.”
This is the first sentence ever spoken in telecommunications as used by the German inventor Philipp Reis, who invented the phone call years before Graham Bell had the idea patented and became world famous.
Reis called his invention “Telephon” which later became the international name for something we use on a daily basis.
Voice interaction is going new ways. We are always trying to change the market research game and are very proud to present the first pure digital speech interaction in market research powered by questfox.
The new questfox feature of Text2Speech lets you create speaking questionnaires. Any text implemented is read out loud to the respondent by an artificial voice. Together with our already developed Voice question type functions we are looking forward to see complete questionnaires without ever using text anymore.
We are not yet there, but this is an attack on the classic telephone interview. We are not only looking for the reduction of cost when developing such an approach, but we are also trying to create interviews of higher quality because of the standardization of the spoken interview.
A big plus is the opportunity to use questlogix and analytic tools in the background. A fully functional digital voice interview would outperform the classic approach by far. It is faster, of higher quality and definitively cheaper.
To honor Philipp Reis, the courageous German inventor, we invite you to test these functions under the hashtag #Gurkensalat. Let us see, what this technology brings.
At the moment we start doing our testing in the German language only. English is soon to follow with the opportunity to select different voices.
Fonts size in pt or em?? em in CSS in questfox
Posted: 11. April 2023 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a commentFont size in PT (point) is an absolute size based on the physical size of a point. One point equals 1/72 inch or 0.35 mm. The font size in PT remains constant regardless of the size of the screen or display unit. So you better NOT use PT inside of questfox as the size is fixed and not adaptive to different screen sizes.
Font size in EM is a relative size based on the size of the font. An EM is equal to the width of the uppercase “M” in the font. The font size in EM adapts to the size of the screen or display unit.
Another difference is that font size in PT is typically used for print while font size in EM is used for screen and web design.
We are sorry, that most of the font settings inside of questfox come from the times before the standardization of em in html was established. We recommend to use only em as a setting in the CSS definition of your project.
font-size: 1.6 em is for example a major increase in 60% of size. But the actual size depends on the device used.

The definition of the CSS is defined underneath

In this textfield you find a basic definition for your project that you can overwrite with your settings.
Examples:
Font of the question
.questionText > span > p{
font-size: 1.4em;
font-weight: 400;
}
Change of answer text size
.answerItemLabel{
font-size: 1.3em;
font-weight: bold;
}
Multiple Choice answer buttons
.answerItem{
font-size: 1.6em;
font-weight: bold;
}
/*Definition Tinsort Buttons with integrated Font and different color*/
.btn{
font-size: 1.2em;
font-family: ‘TeleNeo’, sans-serif;
color: #262626;
}
CSS Video Hack in questfox
Posted: 31. March 2022 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a commentSometimes you do not want to disturb people during an interview showing them their own face.
While keeping up the recording quality, it is possible to shrink the video screen with CSS.
#videoElement {
max-width: 100px;
}
#videoContainer {
max-width: 200px;
}
#controlElement {
max-width: 300px;
}

If you want to have an instagram effect with the recording button on top of the video you can have the following setting
videoElement {max-width: 100px;
max-height: 100px;
}
videoContainer {max-width: 200px;
max-height: 100px;
}
controlElement {max-width: 300px;
color:blue;
}

Changing the Next Icon in questfox Next Button
Posted: 28. March 2022 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a commentThe standard NEXT button in questfox appears to be boring sometimes. You can change the colors and the mouse-over colors including the text under project style and then Next-/Back-Button

Additionally you can change the little icon on the right side by adding a css to your project design
This is how you integrate the code for a standard icon
The icon should be around 30 pixels in height. You can also experiment with bigger ones.
.btnNext .btn::after { content: url(“https://linktoyouricon.png”); }
And in case you want to use a different icon for the mouse-over setting this is also possible with the :hover function
.btnNext .btn:hover::after { content: url(“https://linktoyouricon.png”); }
As you can see animated GIFs are also possible
Hope you can make things more beautiful with this little hack.
How to work with AUDIO Files generated with questfox.com Speech in Research
Posted: 2. February 2022 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a commentEver since we are transcribing speech into text in research we also allow the option to record the real voice of the customer.
Out latest update also includes the iOS world and the long term problem case of the Safari browser which can finally be used for speech in research projects (see post about iOS).
Before you can record the voice of someone you clearly need the person’s acceptance. As we do not want to store any person’s real data on our servers we implemented a way to allow you to save the audio files apart from the answer data in questfox (see post about your own SFTP Server).
The alsway upcoming question now is how to work with the audio data in a market research project?
Several tools allow you to work with audio files.
A very professional one is Audacity which can be installed on any computer and helps as a cutting software to create a list of your files. Audacity is a freeware that operates on a professional level.
A nice tool to stitch hundreds of audio files together ist the tiny tool Freemake. It allows you to create one single file from a bucket list of literally hundreds of audio files. So you can combines all the answers to one question with just one mouseclick.
In order to share your one or several files with your clients and other researchers we advise you to use a sharing service like Soundcloud. www.soundcloud.com allows you to share files non-publicly. And this is probably what you are looking for.
We are still looking for professional services that allow us to work with AI technology on the audio data. Until this is available we do have to listen to the real voice of the customer.
How change colors in the questfox Living Report
Posted: 2. February 2022 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a commentquestfox allows you to use your own color palette in the reporting section.
The questfox reporting standard looks as such:

We admit that the standard colorset may be less good looking, but you can change it anytime under Design Settings
Chart by integrating a list of hexcolors separated by comma.
Example of a color palette: #f6511d,#ffb400,#00a6ed,#7fb800,#0d2c54

The report will use the first entry as the first color. The 2nd as the second and so on…
This is how the initial example will look like in the new color set.

This changes the colors for all graphics in that specific project. You can still individually change the colors of one graphic.
Where to get colors from? One of our favorite tools to generate a nice color palette is https://coolors.co/

The tool creates nice sets of colors that can easily be integrated into questfox by clicking on export.

Just copy&paste the CSS into questfox.
Try to get inspired by other palettes

https://flatuicolors.com/palette/es
Re-Direct In and Out inside the questionnaire
Posted: 21. July 2021 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a commentSometimes you need to use other tools than questfox in the middle of your questionnaire.
In order to make sure, that you can continue after the interview with your questfox interview journey you need to make sure, that the IDs are taken over from one software piece into the next and back again.
The defined variable will be sent to the target software. Make sure that the target is existing (here: participation_id).
When coming back from a third party tool make sure that you get the ID back as a participation ID. The third party tool should then start a link as such:
https: //q.questfox.com/go.html?BID= PROJECTID &panel=PANELPROVIDER &participation_id=%participation_id%
Attention: every tool has a different name for the participation ID. When dealing with a panel please attach @panel=PANELPROVIDER to make sure that the system remembers this.
The external ID for questfox is called exid when not dealing with a panel
Agile Presentation from Live Data with questfox Living Reports
Posted: 14. July 2021 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a commentFor years we are promoting the idea of live presentation right from the data collection tool. See our post from 2015.
To be honest we are not really successful as users tend to rely on the idea of downloading and organizing data on their own hard disk.
We are not giving up promoting the idea and we support your agile reporting with some updates in the section of questfox reporting.
After the definition of your report you can find the View Living Report inside your report.

Every questfox Living Report is organized by the chapter headline. You can right away run into your section or scroll down through your report.

If you plan to show the results to someone please click on Show Presentation

Your report will be presented chart by chart. Clicking on the right side brings you to the next page

You can move forward and down (in case there is more than one chart on the side) and later back.
Pressing ESC will bring you to the general overview. From there you can right away click onto the desired slide.

Overview of Living Report


A hint from outside of questfox:
You can set Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, Microsoft Edge, or Mozilla Firefox to full screen mode on a computer, hiding the toolbars and address bar, by pressing the F11 key on your keyboard. To reverse this action and show these items again, press F11 once more. Your presentation will look like a PowerPoint presentation in full screen mode.
Hoping to inspire your research with this supportive toolset.
questfox.news is now online
Posted: 24. April 2021 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a commentWe are trying to seperate the domain landscape of questfox a little.
Since 2020 the website to get in touch with us is available under www.questfox.online
The news blog is available under www.questfox.news
And the one and only questfox tool remains available under www.questfox.com/admin.