Category Archives: Business

HOCK international: Case Study on the Flexibility and Customizability of Watu PRO

Written By Kevin Hock, CFO of HOCK international

Watu Pro – An Easy Choice

HOCK international prepares candidates for professional accounting exams, and test banks are a critical tool in our study programs. With thousands of multiple-choice questions per exam, we needed a way to categorize, organize, and offer questions by topic to students.

While it can be difficult to evaluate and choose from the dozens of quiz plugins available for WordPress, Watu Pro has been a cornerstone of our learning management system since 2014. In this case study, I will explain how we chose Watu Pro, show some of what is possible using Watu Pro, and give examples of how easily it can be customized.

Powerful and Flexible Test Bank

Watu Pro’s question categories allow us to organize the questions in a way that mirrors the exam structure, and then offer questions to students in various combinations, including by topic, by Section, and from multiple Sections. Furthermore, Watu Pro’s ability to re-use questions from entire quizzes rather than just selecting specific questions is a powerful and unique feature, even among other quiz systems that claim to offer test bank capabilities.

The following screenshot shows how easily a student can pick questions to study from one or many topics (and see their current statistics):

Question Selection

Detailed Statistics

Students preparing for professional certifications want detailed statistics about their performance. Watu Pro’s database tables store every student response in any easy-to-understand layout, which is convenient for creating custom queries to show the students’ progress. Aggregate queries such as SUM, COUNT, and MAX can all be used to create performance metrics. By storing the results of such queries in the WordPress user metadata table, statistics can be displayed in dashboards created through page builders like Beaver Builder, as shown in the following screenshot.

MCQ Stats and charts

HOCK’s Customizations to Watu Pro

Beyond the built-in features, the modular design of Watu Pro allows PHP/MySQL programmers to easily edit the code. With only minimal modifications, we were able to add the following customizations:

  • Show bar graphs of topic-by-topic performance using the wpDataTables plugin.
  • Group incorrect answer choice explanations using expanders.
  • Display explanations for only a limited number of unanswered questions on each quiz.
  • Allow students to delete quizzes with a score under 25%.
  • Show the percent correct next to each topic in the question selection list.
  • Choose questions not yet answered correctly before repeating questions.
  • Sort “All of the above” and “None of the above” to always appear as the last answer choice, even with answer randomization.
  • Create reports for the percent of students who get each question correct on their first try to identify difficult or poorly-worded questions.

Extensive Visual Customization

Watu Pro uses CSS to control many aspects of the quiz layout. In the screenshots below, compare the standard Watu Pro layout to one of the layouts created by Watu’s designer to get an idea for how much the look and feel can be modified.

Default Layout

default design example

Customized Layout

customized design example

The Watu Pro Advantage

Even when HOCK investigated commercial AI-driven learning systems, none of them could match the features offered by Watu Pro. Furthermore, being able to extend the capabilities of Watu Pro offers tremendous advantages over other quiz platforms. With the help of Watu Pro, HOCK has been able to offer a best-in-class learning experience for our students.

About HOCK international

Founded in 2000 by Brian Hock, HOCK international provides complete and affordable study materials for the Certified Management Accountant (CMA) and Certified Internal Auditor (CIA) exams. In addition to the robust test bank powered by Watu Pro, HOCK also offers detailed textbooks, multimedia classroom videos, and the best support and guarantees on the market.

Your Small Business Website Does Not Need WordPress

Don’t get me wrong, I still love WordPress.

We at Kiboko Labs have built several successful plugins and themes for WordPress. Most notably WatuPRO, the Chained Quiz, Namaste! LMS, Arigato PRO, Hostel PRO. We will be very happy if you use our plugins.

For the more than 10 years actively developing plugins, customizing apps and fixing sites, I know most of the WordPress weirdness by heart. We can still do almost everything with it. If you need help with WordPress, I’ll be happy if you get in touch.

WordPress is still one of the most affordable ways to get a non-trivial small business web app developed.

However… in most cases…

Your Website Does Not Need It

WordPress still powers a huge part of the websites. As of 2021 it powers more than 1/3 of the websites on the internet! Everyone is using it.

If you contact a web agency to have a website developed, most of them will suggest you to use WordPress. Why?

  • Because everyone is using it.
  • Because this is what they know.
  • Because this is what they like.
  • Because this is what they love.
  • Sometimes it’s because this is how they can charge you more.

Do you notice that there is nowhere “you” in the above reasons?

That’s because it’s usually about them.

But Why Not Use it?

Photo by Ferenc Horvath on Unsplash

  • It’s not as user-friendly that they want you to believe. All these menus, plugins, taxonomy, Gutenberg block editor, tools, is that user friendly?
  • It’s bloated. Sorry, WordPress, I love you, but that’s the truth. It used to be a tiny piece of software for blogging. Now it’s a huge software full with functions that you’ll never need.
  • It can be slow. Even if you cache the front-end, the back-end of some crowded with plugin WP sites is slow as hell.
  • It has to be constantly updated or you risk your site being hacked.
  • It can be costly to develop and maintain. What is advertised as easy and “almost free” quickly becomes bloody expensive as soon as you want something “out of the box”. Heck, even installing a theme is not always easy.

Then What?

Some companies (most of these that will not suggest you to use WordPress) will tell you that you need a powerful CMS or a “no-code tool”. Webflow, Drupal, Craft CMS, Flutter CMS, Plone, Joomla, Wix…

These are all good tools.

You likely don’t need them either.

Some companies will offer you custom development with cutting-edge technologies ( buzzwords). Laravel, Django, Rails, Node.js, React… “you’ll love to deploy our custom kubernetes orchestration of Java based microservices glued with Rust and Goland code…”

These companies may be good developers. Maybe they are even great.

But your teacher’s or plumber’s website does not need any of this.

This is over-engineering a simple problem.

Photo by Shane Rounce on Unsplash

Just because you want to have a contact form or even a booking calendar does not mean you need huge and costly software installed.

Yes, some small businesses do need a CMS. Some do need complex web based apps. These will benefit from custom development or a customized WordPress.

Some will blog regularly – these businesses will benefit of using WordPress or a similar CMS.

Many small business owners think they need a blog or a news section. They believe they will write regularly and will get search engine traffic because “content is king”.

“I need a blog. I will write a lot. I will get free traffic to my blog from the search engines”.

You don’t need a blog. You won’t write a lot (if at all). You won’t get free traffic from the search engines.

Most of these blogs and news sections stay stale. The owners write 3-4 posts and then stop. They are busy with their business. And that’s good because writing a blog does not bring traffic. Not anymore at least. Believing you’ll just write some content and users will come and find you is so 2010.

Simple, Light and Static. Or Mostly Static

That’s what your dentist’s / plumber / teacher / laywer / … site needs.

Simple and clean.

clean desk

Photo by Samantha Gades on Unsplash

Static, the heck?! It’s 2022?!

Exactly because it’s 2022.

I’m working on web development since around 1999. There was no Twitter yet. There was no Facebook. There was no Gmail.

I built sites in Notepad. I built sites in Frontpage. I built sites in Dreamweaver. I’ve built sites in plain HTML. I’ve built sites in HTML + CSS and JavaScript. I’ve built sites with Perl / CGI scripts. Then PHP. Then Joomla, WordPress, Drupal, Laravel, you name it. I’ve seen the advantages and disadvantages of all.

Your small business 10-pages site with a contact form does not need WordPress. It does not need any CMS or a framework.

It needs good old static HTML and maybe some PHP.  Hosted on a cheap shared host, files uploaded with FileZilla. No deployment required. Usually no database required.

But this means someone has to code it!!!

Let me tell you a secret – creating a site always needs a professional even if you use a “no code” tool or a CMS. Unless you are fairly good at setting up WordPress and designing a theme you will always need the services of a web development company or at least a freelancer. If you want your site to be professional and secure, of course.

So then what are the benefits of going static instead of using WordPress or another CMS?

  • It’s more affordable. Yes, you hear me right. You may pay $1,000 at the beginning. Sometimes even less for a 7-8 pages website. And then hosting + domain will be about 50 bucks per YEAR. Maybe you’ll need a couple of changes here and there across the year. It’s super easy to do small changes in a HTML file! It’s easier than learning a CMS, trust me. But in case you are totally non-technical and don’t want to touch any HTML files or not to mention PHP, that’s OK. You can pay for them and probably that would be 50 bucks per change a couple of times in the year. Compare this to a managed WordPress hosting which, just the hosting, often starts from $300 per year.
    The developers will tell you that you can do your changes yourself. They won’t tell you how easy it is to break something, to have something misaligned, to be unable to set a font size properly or a border around image. And you’ll end up paying again, but every change will be more expensive because we have to write a custom shortcode or maybe that widget will break or, oh, this does not fit the theme, let me find you a plugin – this one is good, it costs only $98 per year… You get the idea.
    Unless you change the content on your site frequently and cannot change it yourself, having a static or semi-static site is much much cheaper.
  • Static sites are faster. Nothing beats static. Nothing. Even a fully cached WordPress is slower. And then you have the problems with cache not purging when you need it to purge, with the caching plugin breaking your site, displaying odd errors, serving outdated images, and so on.
  • The code can be much cleaner. “Can be” because not all developers write good code. But still it’s much much easier to figure out what’s wrong when everything on the page is in one file, maybe with an included header and footer.
  • There is no bloat. No hundreds of JavaScript files you never use and have no idea what are they for. No CSS from different plugins.
  • They do not require updates. If your site uses PHP there is a slight chance that once in a few years you may need someone to have a look at some deprecated function. Even that is rare. I have PHP sites running without any work done on them for more than 10 years.
  • They are virtually unhackable (except when someone gains access directly to your server – which is also a problem for ANY other setup). A static website does not take any user input so there is no way to hack it. If you use some basic PHP for a contact form you need an OK developer that won’t leave holes in it. But this is nothing compared to the hackability of the big CMS-es.
  • They can be hosted anywhere and moved easily. There is no “deployment”. No dependencies. In most cases you don’t need even a database. So you’ll have no problems with setting up DB connections, getting DB connection errors, etc. Every host, even the cheapest, can host HTML and PHP files. Just download your files from the previous hosting service and upload on the new one.
  • Even a super junior developer can do some basic changes to a static site. Maybe you. Maybe your daughter. Maybe your brother. Maybe even your neighbor.

You get the idea. Just have a static site build, maybe with a contact form. If you are short on budget and time you can even use a cheap Bootstrap template and have the whole site built in 2-3 days for a few hundred bucks.

Ideally it’s better to have a custom design – this may take 1-2 weeks and cost $1k – $2k, but it’s a one time payment. And it’s still cheaper and faster than most other options.

What is Semi Static?

Most sites need a least a contact form. So you may need some programming, at least a little bit. Maybe you’ll want some price list updated from a CSV etc, you may even need a simple database with products. These things may get you closer to a CMS but while you are having only 3-4 dynamic sections it’s still better to have most of your site static and update only these settings rather than setting up a whole CMS like WordPress and having it “drive” your whole site.

Static Site Builders?

If you are closer to the web development community you may have heard about them. Jekyll, Hugo, Gatsby… They are great tool for generating static sites while still having a full powered CMS on a local installation.

They can be a great solution, because they have most of the advantages of static sites that I listed above. However installing and using these tools is a lot more technical and you either need to learn them yourself, or have a developer.

They are good options, however – it depends on your use case. If you are unsure and need help, feel free to contact me for a free advice.

What You Need To Know About Running Good Surveys

Here we are with another lengthy data-driven guide – this time on surveys. Based on our experiences with WatuPRO and results of our customers, there are some quite interesting conclusions that will help you be more successful with your surveys.

How To Construct The Survey

example questions

Of course the main part of your work on every survey is actually creating the questions. This is super individual and depends a lot on your specific needs, niche and goals. There are however some general tips which you should follow to increase the usefulness and the visitor-to-response ratio:

  • Always collect some kind of pivot / demographic information. You need to know some basics about your respondents that you can later segment on. Typically demographics like age, sex, location, and so on. Most surveys are useful if you can break down your users on at least one criteria, usually at least 2 or 3. This is not an absolute requirement but you will almost never see a deep survey that does not segment the respondents by some kind of demographic or other pivot criteria.
  • When defining the demographic questions, consider the expected volume of the responses. Of course you can’t always know in advance how many responses you are going to get. But if you are running a survey on a small site without any advertising budget or a private survey in a membership site you might be happy with a few hundred responses. In this case splitting your demographics in too many pieces wouldn’t make sense because it will give you statistically insignificant information. On the other hand a survey with hundreds of thousands responses can allow you to do super precise segmentation. For example by age – having the user type the exact age instead of selecting a range. Still, even if this case you need to think how useful the data will be in such format and how easy to read.
  • Enough questions. As with other quizzes there are no strict rules here. The most important thing is that you ask enough questions to collect the data you need. Try to stick to the lower number to avoid annoying your respondents.
  • Sections. Longer surveys do need to be paginated and split into question categories. This is extremely important to avoid losing user’s attention. Surveys with thematic sections tend to perform best.
  • Simpler questions. Unlike knowledge quizzes which usually benefit of using versatile question types, surveys are doing much better with simpler questions. In fact one of the best performing surveys contain only single choice / multiple choice questions or a likert scale. So, stick to simplicity in most cases. Slider questions work good though.
  • Quantitative questions. Surveys are used mostly to analyze volumes of data and draw conclusions. So you should in general avoid questions like essays, fill the blanks, and similar. You need responses that can be summarized and that allow you to run reports on them and probably draw charts.

This is by no means a complete list but should be enough to help you create a survey which is better than most others.

Marketing The Survey

marketing

Image by deepak pal

Ideally you will have an existing audience to run your survey on. This could be social media followers, blog subscribers, existing customers, demo users, free product users, mailing lists subscribers…

Surveys usually do not directly generate revenue so marketing them with a hard earned cash is usually not done by small businesses  and individual entrepreneurs.

When the survey is sent to an existing audience it’s also usually getting good percentage of responses. Of course only if it’s intriguing as a topic and type of questions.

PPC and regular ads are typically out of question for most of us. There are some paid services focused explicitly on surveys where each response may cost you a dollar or so. This can still be expensive if you need a couple of thousands of replies and the quality won’t be always good because the respondents are paid to take surveys. So it’s much preferred if you can get a free and organic reach to really interested participants.

Here are several  posts with ideas how to promote your survey:

If you decide to spend money on attracting participants make sure to monitor closely the quality of their responses. Quickly stop spending if it looks like you are paying for answers from bots or people who just randomly click on the answers so they “complete” the survey and get a few cents for the “work”.

Provide Some Incentives

jellies and choko coins

Photo credit

Surveys are typically most useful for the one who runs them and less for the respondent. Unlike quizzes where the user learns something about them or completes a course, gets a certificate, etc, the survey respondent typically gets a thank you 🙂 And sometimes but not always they can see the result of the survey up to this moment – or later when it’s considered completed and published.

For this reason you may get low responses on surveys. Incentives help to increase the survey responses. Here are some ideas:

  • Direct payment. I would avoid it. Not only because it may cost you a lot but also because people who respond to surveys to get paid have one primary motive – to get paid. They are often more interested to respond fast and get the money rather than to provide good meaningful responses.
  • Discount codes. This is much better. First, you will hopefully make some sales. Second, the survey will be taken by users who are interested in your products or services. And this is what you usually want – not some general answers from the whole internet.
  • Lottery prizes / giveaway. This is slightly better than making a direct payment because you’ll spend less money. Better give a free product or service rather than money. Again, mostly because you’ll attract better respondents.
  • A personality result or personalized advice. Now, this is not always possible but maybe you can combine your survey with a personality result. And have it calculate some kind of a personality type or advice to the user based on their responses. Bingo! You’ll receive excellent answers and will get them for free. Think along the lines “answer this survey and find out what’s the best… for you”.
  • Certification. Sometimes you can combine the survey with a knowledge test. This works best if the goal of your survey is to figure out how knowledgeable are the respondents on a given topic but may also work to collect demographic or opinions data. If you can do such a combination, the certification for the taken test is your incentive. And the best of it is that  users will answer really carefully.

If you have experience with other incentives – either as a survey runner or a respondent, please share in the comments.

How to make the survey more attractive: ask for an opinion

This is in line with incentives but not exactly. Here the incentive itself is to give an opinion 🙂 People love doing it. So surveys that ask for opinions perform best: voting surveys, surveys that evaluate trust in political figures, sport forecasts or financial forecasts, etc. Make people feel their opinion is important and they’ll be happy to answer your survey.

Even if you don’t need the opinion for your analysis it’s always a good idea to include some questions that ask for it. This won’t hurt your data but will make people eager to participate. In fact more surveys do need exactly user’s opinion: their preferences to specific products or services, the likelihood to do something, their personal habits, and so on.

Get the most of these leads

Even though you probably don’t think about the survey respondents as “leads” in fact they are. The fact that they spent the time and attention into your survey prove that they like you (or your site/company, etc) and are interested in what you have to offer. Unless you paid them to participate in the survey of course – which is why, again, I don’t like the idea to pay for survey responses.

So treat these people as leads. Ask for their email address and for agreement to contact them. One of the easiest ways to get their agreement is to promise sending them the survey findings when the analysis is done (and of course, fulfill your promise!). These people spent the time to answer the survey – of course they want to know how everyone responded to it!

Then later you can send them any kind of offers related to the survey topic. Send them another survey, incentives, anything. Use the survey as your marketing funnel for other stuff that you have to offer.

The most important ways of survey data analysis

There are a lot of very elaborated ways you can extract data from a survey. Also, you won’t need most of them 🙂 Usually unless you are running some kind of quite complicated science you’ll need some of these analysis:

  • Cumulative data per question. This will show you how many and what percentage of users have selected each answer on each question. So if a question contains 3 answers you need to know how many of the respondents selected A, B, and C. This is a typical feature of most survey softwares (yes, available in WatuPRO survey bundles) and it is one of the most useful ones.
  • List of answers per question. In addition to see everyone’s individual answer sheet you may want to have a look at a list of everyone’s answers on every question.
  • Cross-tabulation stats. This is one of the most useful advanced analysis methods. It will show you the intersection of the different questions and answers. Said simpler, you would usually use it to see what percentages of each demographic segment of your respondents have selected the different answers on a selected question. You can of course segment on any criteria like interest, income, product used, and so on.
  • Statistics per question category if your survey has different categories.
  • Points collected and point averages. Not all surveys assign points to answers but sometimes this is an extremely useful method to run quantitative stats on questions or question categories. For example if you use slider questions the averages can give you insights – about customer’s satisfaction with some features or products, about the level of interest for different services, and so on.

You can find some ideas for specific survey analysis here.