Question and answer mode

Q&A (question and answer) mode is used to gather opinions and /or test understanding using a format of questions with a selection of "answers" for each question. For example you could ask which of the choices is the most popular brand, or at which location should an event be held at, or testing knowledge before and after a training session.

The purpose of the Q&A facility

The question and answer facility in Impact Explorer™ allows you to obtain feedback from the participants in a multiple-choice format. This is useful for activities such as:

• A warm-up icebreaker quiz
• A brand-recognition testing
• Determining audience demographics
• Testing knowledge before and after training
• Establishing the norms that exist within a group
• Gathering expert opinion
• Explore existing knowledge
• Test understanding
• Determine audience demographics

Q&A mode allows you to integrate response modes (yes/no, sliding scale and multiple choice) for more varied and stimulating audience participation. The prompts and response choices used are entirely up to you. You can enter them directly into the software, or prepare them in a spreadsheet and import quickly.

At the end of the assessment session, a graph can be displayed which shows the distribution of opinion.

In use

The Q&A mode is started using the Activity Wizard, and the choices are configured using the list manager.

You can configure the questions and answers using the List Manager. Because you may want to use a list of questions more than once in a session for different purposes, the software uses named lists.

You can either select an existing list, or create a new one. If your data is on the clipboard, in a file, or in Decision Explorer®, you can click to quickly import it. Or you can type in your list as you go (perhaps using suggestions from participants). The List manager is available here too to allow you to review the lists, and do more complex manipulations.

Once you have your list of choices, you click Next to choose how the results graphs are to be shown.

The default is to show the results graph after each element has been assessed, which allows for immediate discussion of the results. It depends on the purpose of your workshop whether or not you choose to show the results graphs immediately. It is obviously faster not to show the results graphs as you go, but to go straight into the next question. If you choose this, you can either show the graphs at the end of the whole activity, or not at all.

Agenda preparation

The activity wizard is very quick to use, and therefore ideal for informal workshops and impromptu meetings, but you can also create a full agenda for a meeting, preparing all the options in advance. Such agendas allow you to quickly load and activate a meeting, and you can save them as templates for repeated use. Of course you can also use impromptu activities in pre-prepared workshops too.

Q&A Voting (registering responses)

The voting itself is done using a large-font display. An optional display of the full element list can be shown as well as the current element being displayed large at the top. The options that the participants can choose are also displayed large. Note that the toolbar is hidden during the vote, to avoid distractions.

The bottom of the window shows the number of participants still to vote. Once all the votes have been cast, the display will change according to the graph options selected in the wizard (see above). To move onto the next item, select the large arrow button on the display, or hit the space bar.

Results graph

The form of the display for the results graph is quite flexible, allowing a number of different display styles.

The graph can be displayed vertically, horizontally, or as a pie chart. The votes cast can be displayed as rectangles or cylinders, with a variety of attractive designs. The bars/pie-slices can have a variety of labeling, and the background can be configured to be plain or gradient colored. If you wish to show a corporate logo, or custom background, then you can load an image file. Finally you can choose a 2D or 3D display. All of the options are remembered between uses, so once you have it configured as you like, you can keep it that way.

Meeting review

As with all of the data in Impact Explorer™, the software automatically saves the result graphs to disk as you go, and records the meeting information at the same time. This means that you can be assured that your results are safe on disk, and also that you can review the meeting (or restart it later) for report generation. An export to Microsoft Word® is available to save you typing the basic meeting details in, and can include the full results as well as the pictures generated.