User Agent and respondent meta data

A User Agent is a computer user's software configuration. As a computer user navigates to a website, part of the HTTP request includes a User Agent string which identifies the user's software configuration. This way, the server delivering the content can tailor the content to suit the user's software. This is especially useful for mobile applications, as a website may show a different version to users navigating to the site on an iPhone than it does users on a desktop or laptop computer.

IntelliSurvey saves the User Agent string in a variable called user_agent, which may be found in the System fields chapter in a survey's data set.

The User Agent string contains more than one data point. In fact, it contains fairly detailed information about the user's machine. This information is parsed out into variables for each data point, which can be found in the Appendix chapter under the sub-chapter titled Device Data (see device data values for variable content descriptions). These are:

Sometimes, a survey taker will start a survey from one device, and continue it on another. For this reason the user_agent field and its associated variables noted above are updated on every new survey page. This way, a user who starts a survey on a desktop machine and switches to a phone or tablet midway through will be delivered the correct device-specific content.