Tech Challenge Thing #3 Web 2.0

The two SEOmoz Web 2.0 Award winners I chose were: WuFoo and Dabble db. I had a recent email asking for suggestions for online questionnaire creation and this seems to be WuFoo’s specialty. Since you get more mileage out of an A-B comparison, I thought I’d better choose another similar application for the purposes of this exercise. WuFoo is the number one rated application in the category Content Aggregation and Management. Their ratings are 4/5 for Usability (guess that Usefulness does not impact Usability or vice versa), 5/5 for Usefulness, 4/5 for Social Aspects, 5/5 for User Interface and Design and 5/5 for Content Quality.
The first problem with WuFoo is that the tutorial begins after you’ve already created a form in Form Builder which seems odd and very unhelpful. It starts with Form Manager. Secondly, SEOmoz doesn’t tell you that WuFoo charges for forms after the first three free ones. Luckily, WuFoo makes that information fairly easy to find. I picked my WuFoo URL to be http://obrienellen.wufoo.com/. I chair a meeting once a month so I decided to try the Meeting Form template for fee. Also, there is almost no guidance on how to use the many choices presented for form design, so, unless you are an expert form designer already, you are going to default to the WuFoo templates to save time and headaches. WuFoo initially presents 10 forms, of which the Meeting Form is one. The meeting form looked reasonable – when, where, why, who and agenda items, decisions reached and follow-ups. I selected the form but there were no instructions about how to save it, make formatting changes or add fields, although there were plenty of fields that could be added, including some that I bet very few novices would recognize such as “Likert”. If you click on Help, then you get some direction but WuFoo does not seem really intuitive. Or maybe I chose the wrong application because it seems to me that the Meeting Form template isn’t going to collect much data for me, which is what WuFoo claims is their specialty. So I’ll pick another form and try again.
The second highest rated application in Content Aggregation and Management is Dabble DB. It’s rated: 4/5 for Usability, 5/5 for Usefulness, 3/5 for Social Aspects, 3/5 for User Interface and Design, 4/5 for Content Quality. Like so many of these applications, Dabble offers a “free” option and a paid plan and a free trial. The paid plan ensures that your data are secure. It seems really reasonable at $8 per user but, if you are building one of the bigger databases, you might be paying a lot of money! Dabble offers a video tutorial plus written online instructions under a tab headed “Details” – not where I’d look for training but that’s just me. (obrien.ellen.dabbledb.com) DabbleDB has an easy sign up and creates your db right on the spot. After your db is created, you get a nice screen shot of the main work screen for DabbleDB in which each part of the screen is numbered. Mousing over the number gives you information about what that section of the form does and what data go there. There are also hot links to further information about terms used in those descriptions. DabbleDB has a project management-type application with forms which would be very interesting to try. To keep to an A-B comparison, I set up an address book for some friends. Creating a db was really easy! I wonder what the other capabilities are – but so far, this is much easier than WuFoo!