[Sigia-l] user survey questionnaire

[Jesse James Garrett]

On Mar 29, 2004, at 9:32 AM, Patrick Grizzard wrote:

> I am redesigning an intranet for a client with offices in North 
> America, Europe, Asia, South America, etc. We have scheduled time to 
> conduct interviews with users in their NJ office, but in order to get 
> a more representative sampling, we created a questionnaire to post on 
> the current intranet.

You should consider whether the time you will spend planning, writing, 
implementing, and analyzing the results of the questionnaire would be 
better spent getting some representative international users on the 
phone. Yes, you might have to work at some odd hours to do this. 
Welcome to the glamorous world of working for global clients!

> The response of some of the stakeholders is that they feel it will be 
> too time consuming, and therefore senior-level employees and managers 
> will not respond.

They are probably both right and wrong about this. Surveys will 
generally be answered by those who *think* they have time for them; 
senior staff members often have the time, but rarely recognize this. 
Again, telephone interviews will be a more effective means of getting 
in front of them.

> Their suggestion was to make the survey responses multiple choice. I 
> explained that in order for the responses to be useful, we need 
> open-ended responses that do not foreclose any possibilities or lead 
> the user in a particular direction.

Asking closed questions doesn't necessarily mean you're "leading the 
user". It depends on the kind of information you're trying to get. 
There are lots of ways to get at user perceptions without requiring 
them to formulate a response in their own words. Multiple-choice 
questions aren't inherently bad. There are just certain kinds of 
inquiries for which they are well suited, and others for which they 
aren't.

> I know that this is a pretty standard assumption for us, but I am 
> wondering if anyone could point me to specific research/papers that I 
> can use to make my case. Any suggestions appreciated.

<http://www.jjg.net/ia/recon/#part4>

________________________________________________________________________
Jesse James Garrett                                   Now in bookstores:
jjg at jjg.net                            "The Elements of User Experience"
http://www.jjg.net/                         http://www.jjg.net/elements/