Skybox Creative Blog

Ever experience those epiphanic moments when a big idea for an exciting, promising project comes to mind? Most likely, though, you’d want to go through a couple drafts, and run your idea by a few different people before dedicating all of your time to its full-blown creation. This is just the type of thing that Google engineers created Google Labs for.

If you haven’t explored Google Labs yet, it’s basically a place where more venturesome users can play with models of interesting ideas that haven’t yet made it to Google.com. More importantly, it’s a testing site for the Google engineers and researchers who came up with these ideas to get valuable feedback, in order to know how to improve their project to elevate it to Google.com quality … or to assess whether the idea is even worth the time. Though the style of commenting and rating on googlelabs.com is informal, the generated feedback, if wildly positive, can propel the best ideas to become part of the official Google family — Google Labs alumni include Google Alerts, Google Groups, Google Docs, and Google Maps.

Here are a few examples of some impressive current Google Lab experiments:

Scribe

A document writer application that features text completion, correction, automatic link text, and fast formatting. Read an overview of the project, and try it out for yourself!

Page Speed Online

A browser extension that analyzes a website’s content to generate suggestions to speed up page load time. Take a look at some FAQs, and test out Page Speed Online on your website!

City Tours

A customizable mapping service that suggests a walking tour which visits as many nearby points of interest as possible in the time available. Read the user-generated comments and suggestions, and embark on your own guided adventure with City Tours!

Become part of the conversation — don’t forget to comment on these experiments, and help separate the inspiring from the inadequate!

Skybox Creative is a San Diego based Brand Consultancy with an emphasis on Web Design and SEO. Get in touch for a free quote on your next design project or search engine marketing campaign! info@skyboxcreative.com or call us at 619.381.3825

We are huge fans of Google! Not only do they provide the best in search results, but they offer a variety of free services that make our lives easier. Honestly, if you haven’t looked into all the products that Google has to offer, you really should. Each working day, every staff member at Skybox Creative has at least one Google app open in their web browser.

From the awesome Google Calendar that lets you share your schedule or embed on your website to Google Wave for collaborative projects, Google Feedburner to update followers of new blog posts right to their inbox, to Google Docs for file sharing and form tracking…Google has what you need to make your business run more smoothly!

This post is specifically about Google Docs and the ability to create surveys, or any other type of form for that matter, and track the results in a spreadsheet. You even have the option to “Show Summary of Responses” where the data is compiled into bar graphs and pie charts – so easy a child could understand. There are a variety of templates to choose from (although we hope they add more template design options or at least the ability to customize colors sooner than later, nonetheless, they get the job done). You can create a form with ease, specifying whether you want a checklist, multiple choice question, paragraph answer, etc. Once you have completed the form, you have the option to email it or embed it on a web page (see below).

The results are tracked anonymously in a spreadsheet. You also have the option to share the ‘Results’ spreadsheet through Google Docs sharing options (now available for individual docs and entire folders). We have embedded our Client Satisfaction Survey below so you can see what it looks like. We had to force the width and height of the iframe in order for it to fit in our blog – not perfect, but again, gets the job done. If you embed the form on your blog, make sure to click on the HTML tab first, then paste the code. You can easily adjust the dimensions, just make sure to calculate the proportions to make sure it displays optimally. It’s also good to know that (for whatever reason), if you tab back to Visual, it might erase the iframe code – for this reason, we recommend copy/pasting the code in a text editing application so you can grab it again if needed!

Clients ONLY: Feel free to fill out the form with your feedback! All others, if you are interested in speaking to us about the services we offer, please email us at info@skyboxcreative.com