Siemens US Mobile Survey

June, 28th, CIO Americas launched the mobile survey web site to collect information about the business related usage of the mobile phone to all employee of Siemens Corporation (about 400 employees). I was the one who was responsible to make those pages up and running. So I’m going to tell a bit about that project.

The Challenge

The previous survey was conducted in manual way using Microsoft Office (either Excel or Word) which caused a lot of works both during the survey and after the survey to put together the answer from the participant.

CIO Americas engaged me to create the survey page that has more complexity than some other survey page I made before. The project includes also the admin page to see the results and administer the participant.

The Process and Result

I adopted the look and feel of the Siemens Web Guidelines defined on brandville.siemens.com. This is a quick process since I used the web framework I developed with XHTML and CSS (Web Standards). I just need to change some colors and key visual to match my design. This framework is explained in this article.

The survey is restricted only for Siemens employees in US. So the first step of the development was to create a participant database to store all eligible employees and the department name database which delivers the department name to the survey. I use MSSQL for data storage and PHP as script language for the pages. If a user hasn’t been registered yet, he/she can send a request using a web form on the page and the request will go the admin, who will register that user in the admin panel. I prefer to let admin do the registration so that we have uniform inputs syntax regarding the department name, location, etc. The name of all employees is listed as seen below. This part is an included file. I separated it as a single site to make it handy so that I can include it everywhere I want.

The survey should accommodate three kinds of devices (voice, voice data and data) and the amount of device that an employee has. So if you have only one voice device the application will only show the questions for one voice device, but if you have more than one, you need to answer the question for the amount of the devices you have. Well for a person with three devices it will be a long survey. To keep the survey simple for the user with more than one device and all other user, I deactivated on the default view the child questions and make them dependent from the answer their parent questions. So if something not applicable to you, you don’t have to answer the question because it is disabled. That should also avoid you to make mistake and we don’t need to warn you with an error message as well.

An employee who has participated in the survey will disappear from the name list I mentioned before, so that none of the take the survey more than once.

The Admin Panel

The result page is password protected. Once an admin person access the result page, he will see how many employees have participated and from what department they come from. This can be useful for each department if they want to know the result of the survey from their department. A dropdown menu is available on the default page of the admin panel provides the name of department with at least one employee who has participated in the survey. This avoid the admin to guess which department has at least one employee finished the survey. It is also possible to display the result that depends only on the type of devices.

On the left side there is the main navigation of the admin panel. In the admin panel the admin can register a new participant after he/she sends a request as I mentioned before. The register form and application store the information into the participant database and send an email to the employee telling the employee has been registered and can start participating in the survey. An inbox message page list all messages or feedback from the participants. The admin has also the possibility to send a notification to either all participants or the participant who haven’t participated yet. This streamlines the process of sorting the user manually and sends them email from Outlook.

The Benefits

We have an easy to use survey that serves all kind of device owner depending on what the user own and how many devices they own. The web based survey streamlines the process of conducting the survey for the participants and the data processing after the survey for the survey owner. Survey owner has an overview on the result easily and can select different options of the result view according to devices or department. The modular development and use of Web Standards approach reduce the design and development time.