Question Writer Blog

Today I want to write a short note about getting quiz results back by e-mail. There are two ways you can receive results from Quiz Edition quizzes.

The first is by placing an e-mail button on the report page. This is an extra option for the user, but may be unsatisfactory for results gathering for a number of reasons. It piggybacks on the user's e-mail program so the user may change the report. This option also relies on the user having a correctly configured e-mail client and choosing to press the button to actually send the report. These things should all be considered before using this method.

The results by e-mail service can prove more reliable. This option is used in the 'What do you know about Italy?' quiz in the samples section. Each time someone completes this quiz, their results are sent to me by e-mail. Here's what a typical e-mail looks like.

You can enable this for your internet quizzes. It works on intranets too so long as internet access is available. It won't work if you try it from the desktop, as the security manager will kick in and won't let the flash quiz send the results over the internet.

This service works by sending the quiz results to our webserver, which then converts the results to email and sends them to you. This service is offered for free alongside the product and is a best-effort service (so don't rely on it for anything critical). It's guaranteed to be available for two years from your purchase of Quiz Edition, although it's a low cost service to run I don't forsee problems running it over a longer time.

Posted by Alexander at 02:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (2)

I'm expecting to be able to release version 2.0 of Publisher Edition before the end of the month. This will bring the different editions to the same version release. The improvements are mostly in the UI and cosmetic, with the new 2.0 style buttons and interface. It'll also include some new themes that are more 'down-to-earth' than the 10 provided with Version 1.3. To reflect the improvements, there'll also be a slight increase in the price to $1995, although existing users will already be covered by the upgrade protection.

Posted by Alexander at 03:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

If you're creating quizzes with a lot of questions (about 100 or more) you may be running into a limitation with the current stable version of Quiz Edition. The problem is that the report is overwhelmed by the number of questions and doesn't show any total values. You can fix it by using the latest build (this is at a different location to the usual download).

Thanks to Yvan-Martin Levesque of QuebecTrain for finding this one.

Posted by Alexander at 11:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Question Writer 2.0 - Quiz Edition is now officially out of beta. I want to thank everyone who helped with the testing. It was great to get feedback, not just what the bugs were, but what bugs were important. I'm glad that I brought Quiz Edition 2 through the beta process. It's made it a very solid product.

(Note: If you were participating in the beta, you need to get your finished quiz, the .qwz file, in by Friday to avail of the beta tester discount.)

Posted by Alexander at 09:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

I've been doing a lot of usability testing recently. That has involved sitting friends and family down in front of Question Writer and seeing how they use the software first hand. It gives a good idea of what's intuitive and where problems can occur. It has yielded lots of little insights. For instance, I include this little messages where previously people would get confused why nothing had changed after switching a theme -

A point where a lot of testers got frustrated was in adding a new question for the first time. There are two ways to do this in quiz edition, pressing one of the big question buttons or right clicking the quiz node and adding a question. I don't know why, but many users would try anything but press one of those big buttons.

I've added a new menu, 'Add Question', which has the same effect. My experience with usability testing tells me that users will be much more likely to experiement with this, and so less likely to get frustrated.

That's present now in the current version -

Question Writer Assembly Version: 2.0.2232.41471
Flaunt Assembly Version: 6.1.2228.2862

There's a few other small fixes - duplicated questions appear at the bottom of the question tree rather than the top, newlines can't be placed in some one line text fields like they could before.

Posted by Alexander at 12:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I want to thank everyone for all the comments and suggestions that have been coming into the forum. There has been a lot of really good feedback and it will shape Question Writer 3.

If you want to make any requests or suggestions - the book is always open. I can't really say much more than 'request noted' for most feature requests. One of the reasons is that I don't know - I really haven't decided yet. I'll try to give an indication if something is impossible, or very technically difficult, or if something seems like a good idea to me. But I won't to commit to any particular features - I might need to change my mind or find that something is much more difficult that I had thought. I also don't want to give away too much information to the competition.

Anyway, that's Question Writer 3. The focus at the moment is very much clearing up the remaining bugs in Question Writer 2 beta and ensuring its a polished and stable product that users are going to want to stick with.

Posted by Alexander at 08:37 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Michael Lerner has used the Quiz Edition Beta to put together 2 quizzes for his LearnTheNet.com website. The website is targetted at new internet users and explains the basics of internet use in a clear straightfoward way. Once users have learnt some of the basics, they can then go on to try their hand at Net Hunt, where they try to find information available on the web against the clock. After learning about e-mail, they can try this 5 minute quiz to get an idea of their mastery of the topic.

Posted by Alexander at 01:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I've just uploaded a new beta version, with two high priority bugs fixed.

Bug 1. On printouts that included the capital letter 'A' in Tahoma font, a nastly black line would streak down the from the base of the 'A'. It sounds like it should be quite a rare occurence, but it was happening a lot. That's fixed.

Bug 2. On feedback pages that included an image and a scrollbar, the image was zooming out under the feedback text instead of over it. That's fixed too.

To check if you're on the latest version, open the 'About' box from the 'Help' menu, current version is

Question Writer Assembly Version: 2.0.2228.1650
Flaunt Assembly Version: 6.1.2228.2862

Posted by Alexander at 01:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I've just put up a new update of Quiz Edition. (That's Question Writer Assembly Version: 2.0.2225.32051)

It's got lots of little issues fixed that beta testers have been finding.

1. The online help menu item links directly to the Question Writer Forum

2. The Quiz caption is fixed and each question now uses the start of the question text to identify itself in the quiz tree view.

3. The words for True / False are now editable so can be changed according to your language.

4. The Author field in the report has been removed for commercial licenses.

5. The Name / User ID field now obeys the 'Don't embed charset'. This allows for Chinese / Japanese / Korean characters in the Name/ID field. However, if this option is selected, the characters can't be automatically rotated on the report - and so landscape printing, where required needs to be manually selected when priniting.

Posted by Alexander at 06:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Here's a short quiz about Ukranian politics, in Ukranian. I'm not going to identify the author because I don't know what the questions mean but I do know politics in the Ukraine can be a contentious business so I'll leave it out. The reason I'm posting it to show Question Writer working with another character set - in this case, ISO-8859-5 (Cyrillic).

Mostly character sets work transparently, you just enter the text you need and the characters are automatically made available in the quiz, but if you are using fill-in-the-blank quesitons with extended character sets, you need to tell the application to make a particular set of characters available using this option

Quiz Properties - > Advanced Settings -> Embed Font (Check)-> ISO-8859-5 (Cyrillic)

The options are US English, West European, East European, North European, South European, Cyrillic, Arabic, Greek, Hebrew, Turkish, Nordic, Thai, Baltic, Celtic, West European Updated.

Some of the Asian character sets aren't represented here eg. Chinese/Japanese - that's becuase they contain so many characters that it takes too long to include them with the quiz and would make the quiz file size too large. If you'd like your users to be able to enter characters in these character sets, you should uncheck the 'Embed Font' box altogether. Then the user should be able to enter any characters that are available on their local system.

Posted by Alexander at 05:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)