Survais

Survais was featured in the 10words.io mailing list which provided a small number of clicks that I am very grateful for.

Additionally I took some leave from med school and will be working more on Survais - starting with live chat functionality.

Survais added a new type of slide - the call to action.

Simply provides a link for users to click on the Survais widget.

Additionally around this time:

• MailChimp can now be integrated into email capturing slides
• A bare bones WordPress plugin was released to make it easier to enable/disable Survais across your WordPress site

New features were difficult to add in the old state that Survais was in. The architectural design was not very extensible, and it was difficult to add new features.

So after months of being dormant from a development standpoint, Survais was completely redeveloped from scratch - which allowed for many things to be cleaned up and extensibility was kept in the forefront this time.

The old Survais could only ask multiple choice questions. The new Survais added:

• Email capturing
• Feedback capturing
• Information providing

Stripe was also added as our payment processor (there was none before - but no users other than me so who cared).

Development again goes sporadic after August 2017 as I headed back to med school.

Can you call it a redesign if there was no design to begin with?

The Survais homepage was redesigned from scratch. Core functionality of the application remained the same.

Procrastination strikes again.

The user likely came from Reddit, although I can't be sure now looking at the details I have.

(Survais is on a new database now)

The first version of Survais was built over a weekend in December 2016 as I procrastinated studying for my first year medical school exams.

Why? Well, I run an information website for people who want to undertake the GAMSAT exam. This is a medical school entrance exam (I think it is similar to the MCAT in the US).

I wanted a simple tool to ask the readers what content they would like to be added next onto the site (multiple choice question widget of sorts). My time was chronically thin so I wanted to know what the users wanted the most. So, having a background in CS and Web Development, I hacked together something that worked quite nicely for my needs.

I proceeded to sit on this ultra basic version of Survais, along with my list of failed business ideas and websites for a number of months as I dealt with med school.