Hey Likert. Welcome to the Party!

By Kevin Hale · November 18th, 2008

After weeks of planning, preparation and quite a bit of backend architecture adjustment magic, the Wufoo Team is proud to announce the addition of a new field now available to all users across all plans : The Likert Field.

I know we’ve announced a lot of new stuff today, but we’re probably the most excited about this one. For those that don’t know about Likert items, Wikipedia describes the field as “a psychometic scale commonly used in questionnaires, and is the most widely used scale in survey research.” Since we strive to be the easiest way to collect information over the Internet, we thought it only appropriate to try and bring to our users the easiest way to create the most widely used scaling method for measuring bipolar responses from your users.

And our Likert field isn’t just another pretty face. She’s also very flexible and highly customizable. You can adjust the number of columns to measure up to 10 levels of assessment and we’ve even provided lots of alternative predefined levels for you to play with so you can measure not only agreement, but comparison, importance and even satisfaction of the statements you want your users to assess.

Adding statements to your Likert field should also be very easy and familiar. It’s based on the UI we use for creating choices for dropdown and multiple choice fields. Also, with a single click you can hide the values beneath the radio fields or add a Non Applicable column if you want to grant the user a way to definitively show a withholding of opinion when making your Likert field required. Like checkbox choices, please be aware that each statement in a likert field is counted as an individual field and will count against the total field count for the form.

And because we’re devoted not only to user friendly inputs, but beautiful ones as well, we’ve taken additional steps to ensure that a Wufoo Likert field will look great on a wide variety of themes and web sites. Using the same color contrasting formula that we developed for our new graphing system, Wufoo will automatically adjust the border and zebra colors of the field to match and be visible against any form background color that you choose, that includes both light and dark ones.

And that’s it for all the new goodies. We’re really proud of this implementation and are hoping you’ll be just as excited to use it. We can’t wait to see how you’ll use Likert to create better and more powerful surveys to make better and more informed decisions.