Web Survey Development for BOKU Vienna on Mobility in Eisenstadt

The brief

BOKU University Vienna wanted to capture how the people of Eisenstadt think about mobility and traffic in their city. The research team needed structured, analysable answers from a broad public, from commuters and families to long-time residents, collected through a survey anyone could complete in a few minutes on any device.

Off-the-shelf survey tools reach their limits when a study needs full control over question design, data structure and hosting. That is why the project called for custom web survey development: a purpose-built online questionnaire that belongs to the research team from the first question to the final dataset.

Questionnaire logic

The work started with the data model rather than the user interface. Every question, answer option and dependency was modelled first: which questions appear, in which order and under which conditions. That left the entire questionnaire logic in a structure the researchers could reason about and the analysis could rely on later.

On top of that model sits a survey frontend that guides participants intuitively through the questionnaire: one step at a time, clear progress and a responsive layout that works just as well on a phone during a commute as on a desktop at home. A survey for the general public only produces good data if the interface excludes nobody.

Implementation

The survey frontend is built with Angular and TypeScript, backed by a Laravel API written in PHP. The backend validates every submission against the rules of the questionnaire, persists responses in a structure shaped for analysis and keeps incomplete or invalid data out of the dataset.

Validation exists on both sides: immediate, understandable feedback in the browser and strict checks on the server. The result is a robust pipeline from a participant tapping an answer in Eisenstadt to a clean row of research data in Vienna.

Outcome

BOKU Vienna received a production-ready web survey tailored exactly to the study. No licence constraints, no survey platform between the researchers and their data and no compromises in question design.

The project also continued a longer collaboration: after the TRA:WELL study survey in 2023, this was the second web survey I developed for BOKU University Vienna.