As a way to better serve their customers, Steelcase requested that we build them an application that would allow them to administer environmental (work environment) satisfaction surveys to their customers’ employees, track the results, and print reports on those results. This application would allow Steelcase to better match customer needs with available product offerings and also to allow their customers to know areas of concern within their own company. Along with the survey, Steelcase needed an administrative application that would allow them to define different surveys, add and remove survey questions, create user groups, define scheduled survey events to which the user groups could be assigned, and be able to assign the scheduled events to individuals in their sales force. I worked closely with the project lead at Steelcase and a designer in developing the application. The application uses C#.Net and MS SQL Server 2005 on the backend, Javascript and JQuery for the client side scripting.
The Understanding Exercise administration has several parts: user administration where new accounts for Steelcase sales team members could be defined; a member group screen where sales team accounts could be assigned to different user groups that would give them access to various features of the administration; an event creation screen where new survey events could be defined and edited; and an event overview screen where members could track the progress on their survey events and generate reports. When a new event was created, an email would be sent to the customer liaison containing the event details along with a link containing a unique event id that they could share with their employees. During the active period for the survey event, the customer employees could use that link to log-in to the application and participate in the survey.
The Understand Exercise survey comprised three sections: a log-in screen, a four page series of questions, and a rating screen. Once the user logged in they would begin the survey by moving through four screens of questions, each with four questions. Each question defined a certain office condition (e.g. Stimulate and inspire individuals and team) that the user would rate on a scale from 1 to 100 (by way of a slider bar written with Javacscript) depending on how important that particular was to them. Once all sixteen questions were answered, the program would take the five most important issues and ask the user to rate them in order of importance (using a pair of draggable-droppable and sortable lists written in Javascript). The quiz would then end and the results saved in the database.
