December 7, 2023
We’re so proud to be featured in Vertica’s recent case study highlighting how Carnegie Higher Ed uses Protobi (and Protobi uses Vertica), to help universities, colleges, and elite high schools nationwide analyze student data to build their student classes.
December 1, 2023
Protobi is certified as compliant with SOC2 requirements and principles, documented in OneTrust and audited by Pease Bell CPA.
August 11, 2021
Coding open-ends is a way to simplify responses by putting them into countable categories
February 17, 2021
Protobi can show “net net” scores, subtracting one top-box score from another.
Top-box scores are useful to summarize answers on ratings scales. For scales that are bi-directional, it can be interesting to subtract one top-box score from another to get a single measure of balance.
In the example, below, respondents were asked their perceptions of different brands. The table shows thet net favorable, the net unfavorable, and the “net net”, often called the “Net Promoter Score” or NPS:
| 7% | 25% | 8% | 33% | 27% | 32% | 60% | -28% | |
| 9% | 32% | 7% | 28% | 24% | 41% | 51% | -10% | |
| 6% | 41% | 14% | 25% | 14% | 47% | 39% | 8% | |
| 3% | 16% | 9% | 37% | 36% | 18% | 73% | -55% |
Political surveys often show similar net net scores contrasting the percent of voters who are strongly or somewhat in favor of one candidate vs those strongly or somewhat in favor of another.
July 20, 2020
We’re excited to release print layout charts. These are designed to provide precise control over layout and a wide variety of options, within a coherently styled family of charts.
| 18% | 26% | 30% | 15% | 10% | |
| 11% | 23% | 40% | 16% | 11% | |
| 10% | 16% | 35% | 24% | 15% | |
| 10% | 20% | 39% | 20% | 12% | |
| 9% | 16% | 29% | 29% | 16% | |
| 9% | 16% | 29% | 23% | 23% | |
| 9% | 13% | 26% | 29% | 24% | |
| 7% | 14% | 28% | 32% | 19% | |
| 6% | 9% | 21% | 32% | 32% |
July 14, 2018
Surveys can contain “loops” where a subset of the survey is repeated several times per respondent. This is typical in new product assessments, employee satisfaction surveys, patient case research, and observational trials.
You can choose whether to see survey loops “flattened” or “stacked”. Which is best depends on your analysis goals.
June 26, 2018
We're excited to support SERMO Dashboard Analytics! Protobi Viewer is now available with every SERMO RealTime and full length survey globally.
See the intro video:
Your survey design and data are automatically configured and ready to explore. To learn more log into your SERMO Client Portal or visit SERMO Dashboard Analytics with Protobi
June 25, 2018
Your survey asked quantities as absolute counts. But now you need to report them as percentages. Here’s how to calculate ratios and correctly preserve percentages, frequencies and means:
June 16, 2018
Yay! You’ve fielded a global survey in multiple local languages.
Yikes! Now you need to analyze all those local-language verbatims…
Protobi works with Google Translate so you can start reading and even recoding those text verbatims in multiple languages to analyze right away.
June 10, 2018
Straightliners. You know they must be somewhere in your sample … respondents who give the same answer to every question in a section.
If you could see the answers for one respondent for one section, it’d be easy to spot. But how do you quickly identify all straightlines? It’s pretty easy to find them in Protobi using this one trick…
May 8, 2018
As you work, Protobi saves all your changes locally, and your latest version survives closing the browser. You can work on your own copy and push changes up to the server when you’re ready for colleagues to see. Work from an airplane or ferry, then sync your changes when back online.
Select “Local History” from the toolbar context menu (or press Shift+Z). You’ll see a timeline of your most recent changes. Select a timestamp to restore your project as it existed at that moment:
April 1, 2018
Interactive analysis is great for exploring the data, testing hypotheses.
Collaborating online is great for finding the story with colleagues and clients.
But in today’s business world, analysis still has to go into PowerPoint to tell that story to the broader organization.
Protobi lets you create visualizations that look more like your presentation than your survey. And export into your own PowerPoint template as editable chart objects.
March 1, 2018
Dynamically resize any chart in Protobi with the mouse. For any selected element, a resize handle appears when you hover.
February 11, 2018
You can show pretty much any distribution as a WordCloud. For instance, you can show the states where survey respondents are located:
February 11, 2018
Perceptual maps can be a useful way to concisely visualize associations among multiple variables. Protobi can create a perceptual map based on principal components analysis for many types of crosstabs.
September 15, 2017
You’ve asked each respondent to answer multiple questions. Now you want to know if respondents’ answers to this question are significantly different than their answers to other questions.
Protobi’s new PairedTable allows you to compare different questions across the same respondents (rather than compare the individual questions for different subsets of respondents). This uses pairwise comparisons for stronger statistical tests.
This uses pairwise comparisons for stronger statistical tests. It uses pairwise t-tests to compare means and McNemar’s test (with small sample corrections) to compare percentages.
For more information, see the Paired table tutorial
September 14, 2017
A TopBoxTornado plot is a concise way to present top- and bottom-box scores for multiple ratings on Likert-type scales.
June 17, 2016
We love bar charts and their simple utility in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. But other chart types also have their role in finding and telling the stories in survey data, and our client work often entails creative custom visualizations…
June 14, 2016
Does your survey include a collection of related questions on a common scale? E.g.
Protobi includes useful tools—top-box summaries, stacked bars, crosstabs and clustering—that make it easy to analyze ratings, rankings, and other questions on common scales.
But the tips here you can do in Excel, R or even PowerPoint…
March 14, 2016
Click here for up-to-the-minute New York Times top stories …in PowerPoint!
As powerful and ubiquitous as the mobile/web has become, PowerPoint is still the platform for business analysis today. Interactivity and rapid collaboration are awesome, but business findings are presented in slides, to be presented, distilled and synthesized, as insights crystallize into decisions.
So we’re pushing the boundaries of PowerPoint on the web, making it easy to export data as slides with native charts and tables. Using your company’s template. And even to instantly update the charts and tables (leaving your text untouched) as new respondents come in.
Which got us to wondering, if all other business results must be presented in PowerPoint why don’t executives ask to see the New York Times in a slide deck? Maybe just no one ever thought it was possible!
So for fun we combined the NYTimes Top News API to test our shiny new library to generate PowerPoint with native charts, images, tables, real time data and user-defined templates.
More to the point, Protobi can export your entire survey… be it in Survey Monkey, TypeForm, Qualtrics and Confirmit Surveys seamlessly to native PowerPoint charts and tables.
July 31, 2015
A key task in any survey is identifying outliers that can mar an otherwise great analysis. Outliers can arise for many reasons – honest mistakes, careless entries, or outright bogus answers. Protobi makes outliers stand out so identifying them is as easy as shooting fish in a barrel.
July 29, 2015
How many ideas might you expect to find in customers' responses to open-ended survey question? Here's an interesting empirical analysis of text verbatim coding from a recent survey, looking at actual data compared to expected values under Zipf's Law and Heap's Law.
The survey question was "Why did you choose the product you selected?". Respondents provided free-text responses. 200 responses were coded in Protobi using the new verbatim coding widget by a professional analyst.
July 20, 2015
Verbatims from open ended survey questions are a rich source of insight for market researchers, and a great way for your survey to tell you something you didn’t already know. But surveys often don’t include them, as analyzing text responses has historically been a hassle.
What if coding text verbatims were fun and easy? Would we ask them more often? Might we learn more of what the market is often very willing to tell us?
If you have a current survey with text verbatim responses, let us know. We’re running a study you might be interested in…
July 15, 2015
How do you find the optimal price for a good or service? Obviously, it depends what you mean by optimal. And pricing is a hugely complex problem. But if your goal is narrowly defined to maximize expected profit based on a discrete choice logit model, this page has an elegant new solution.
We present a simple analytic formula for the optimal price in a discrete choice pricing model. Here, the optimal price is the one that maximizes the expected revenue (or profit), balancing the revenue versus the likelihood of purchase. This formula allows the optimal price to be quickly calculated precisely for each individual customer, for further analysis and action.
June 15, 2015
January 7, 2013
Numbers are more than just important to the Wall Street Journal. And for a wide variety of cases, the simple bar chart is well suited. Dona Wong’s Wall Street Journal Guide to Information Graphics provides a clear and concise guidelines to presenting business data clearly to people who use it.
<img src=”/images/blog/2013-01-07/wong.png” style=”width: 100%”%>
January 2, 2013
A key source of inspiration for many modern app developers is Bret Victor’s musings, sketches and prototypes. Gabriel Florit, a designer at the BostonGlobe.com, shared some of his work in a Boston Data Visualization Meetup that he summarized succinctly as “I saw Bret Victor’s talk, Inventing on Principle, and I built something.”
At Protobi, one of our inspirations is Bret Victor’s reimagination of a New York Times infographic as an elegant sequence of interactive bar charts. Wouldn’t it be great to instantly create an interactive graphic like this from any dataset, big or small? And embed it in your blog, website, or marketing report.
