> KG01 - see comments inline. > > On Tue, Jun 5, 2012 at 8:26 AM, Graham Lauder <y...@apache.org> wrote: > > > > Hi. > > > > > > > > Questions relating to research! > > > > [....] > > > > > Perhaps the first survey we should conduct is a survey about what sort > > > of surveys our users would respond to. > > KG01 - Thanks for your feedback and interest in the user research effort. > While I agree we could deploy different types of surveys to gather > different types of data, I feel that a survey of surveys might induce > premature survey fatigue.
Survey fatique has already set in, that is not a new thing, that is recognisable simply by those surveys conducted by SUN. We haven't caused that, it is a factor of the modern marketing malaise. The cost of incentives these days, that one needs to hand out to get a significant sampling in a timely manner is huge. > User research, especially surveys, consumes > people's time and energy. Indeed as I myself pointed out earlier in this thread > Rather, I propose we work from the other > direction. If the goal of the research activity is to gather data that will > help us build insight and drive informed design and development decisions, > then we should focus the surveys on the information we need to do that. I > have captured some comments in the wiki discussion page. Indeed, however if the sample of respondents is ridiculously small, as has historically been the case, then the data is useless. You cannot use corporate methodologies in an open source environment. We have no ability to offer incentives, we therefore need to make the survey process as pleasant and enjoyable as possible or we need to find out from people what would encourage them to participate. That requires research, I doubt it will require as big a sample as a UX survey but that is only because there are a limited number of answers needed. Every good research organisation I have worked with does short surveys to find out what they're doing right or wrong. For the most part they do these at the end of another survey, but that is because the group of respondents they are questioning will probably never do the same survey again. For us the problem has been getting respondents to finish. Lose them once and they won't come back again and we will need to talk to our user community if not often, at least regularly I would prefer to do things right first time up so people will happily respond to any surveys we need to put out. Remember that there are not only UX surveys to be done but Marketing as well. We know already know two things that get people to complete surveys: Brevity and Fun. If we do a light hearted, quick survey that gives us the reasons that people will participate, I think that's a really good use of resources. The Surveys already put up are boring, generic and not likely to inspire people to complete them. OOo has a user base in the hundreds of millions a few hundred completions is not a sample. We need 10s of thousands of responses across scores of languages, to get a easonable sample. So first we need to figure out how to get that sample. Cheers G
