Understanding User Agent

The easiest way to get info on what devices were used to take your survey is to use the Device Chart reporting option available in Standard Reports. If you're looking for a little more detail however, we have it!

SurveyGizmo collects what is called a User Agent string for every survey response (except anonymous surveys). This string contains information about the browser, operating system, and device of the respondent. This User Agent info can be found either in the individual response on the Details tab or in a CSV/Excel export of the data.

User Agent Example

However, if you don't know how the parts of the string come together, it can be a little overwhelming to try and determine who was using what device.

A typical string will look something like this:

Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_9_5) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/38.0.2125.111 Safari/537.36

In this case, it's pretty easy to tell that this response was made on a Macintosh computer, running 10.9.5 and using Google Chrome. However, it's still a little confusing since it says Mozilla (the makers of Firefox) at the beginning and ends with a reference to Safari (the default Mac web browser).

Here's one that gets a little more complicated:

Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; U; Android 4.2; en-us; Nexus 10 Build/JVP15I) AppleWebKit/534.30 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0 Safari/534.30

This is the user string of a Nexus 10 tablet, running Android 4.2 Jelly Bean and the default Android Browser 4.0. But how on earth were we able to divine all of that? We cheated and used the internet!

One great resource is www.useragentstring.com which will automatically detect your user string when you visit and allows you to paste a user string for analysis. Unfortunately, none of the tools we could find will analyze user strings in bulk. So, if you really want to know what type of device a respondent is using, we recommend asking as a part of your survey to save you the headache of running through hundreds or thousands of user strings.

Note: If a respondent replies to your survey using multiple different devices, the device that was used to first access the survey will be the one recorded in the User Agent section.

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