Most of you have probably participated in a survey
or questionnaire of some kind.
By doing so, you are helping a researcher gather data.
A survey is a research tool that collects demographics:
fact-based information.
And psychographics: opinion-based information.
What makes them unique is that they use a sample audience
as a means to represent a larger population.
Think of it as a way to summarize information about an
entire group without having to speak to each and every
person in it.
Now you might have noticed that I mentioned both
the questionnaire and a survey.
Questionnaires and surveys are two very similar things
and the words are often used interchangeably.
For the sake of our discussion,
we’ll draw one simple distinction between the two.
Surveys are administered by a researcher
asking the questions verbally.
Through either the telephone or in person.
Questionnaires, ask participants to respond on their own.
Usually through an online form or a paper document.
For the rest of our discussion
let’s use the term questionnaire,
since that’s likely what you’ll encounter
working with the most in design research.
Questionnaires asked a series of open-ended
and closed-ended questions in a specific order
to the sample audience.
The effectiveness of the questionnaire relies heavily
on the quality of the question it asks.
So we’ll spend a lot of time in this video
talking about questions.
Open-ended questions prompt the participant
to formulate their own answers.
These questions are great for gathering qualitative data,
such as opinions and beliefs of the participants.
Close-ended questions force participants to choose
their answers from a given list of options.
These types of questions are great for collecting
quantitative data, such as demographics like
gender, age, and race.
Let’s look first closed-ended questions.
We were interested in finding out how many people use
public transportation on their daily commute to work.
To find out this information,
we sent a questionnaire out to a sample audience with a few
close-ended questions.
What is your gender?
Male, female, or other?
How old are you?
Ages 21 to 36 or more.
Which of the following options best describe how often
you use public transportation?
Every day to never.
When you use public transportation, how you spend your time?
Reading.
Listening to music.
Or maybe I don't use public transportation at all.
Notice all the questions provide a specific set of answers
for the participants to select.
And, the responses these questions generate
are all quantitative data.
Such as 55% answered, they use transportation every day.
Or, even more specific, 33% of males ages 21 to 25,
use public transportation a few times a week.
Remember quantitative data is great,
because it’s less subjective than quantitative data.
Did you notice the progression in those questions?
We started with the easy to answers that
provided us with important demographic information.
Then, we worked up to our main points of inquiry.
How often do you use public transportation?
And then we ended with questions
that might tell us a little bit more about why.
Now let’s consider open-ended questions.
Open-ended questions prompt the user
to formulate their own answers.
Their responses are more subjective,
and qualitative in nature.
For example, briefly describe what you do
while taking the bus to work.
By asking this question as an open-opened question,
we give users the ability to elaborate
or respond in a way that we might not have predicted.
Such as, "I usually zone out for a while
"thinking about my weekend plans,
"and then I either read a book, or listen to an audiobook."
So, this sort of thing is great.
If this was written as a close-ended question,
our response would have been much less informative.
When writing open-ended questions
try to avoid being too broad.
Such as, “Tell me about your morning commute.”
Broad questions are far better for an interview
when the researcher can help guide and build
on the response given.
Writing questions takes skill and practice.
Sometime common errors to avoid are leading questions,
questions that make little sense,
or ask the user to rate something
on a subjective, ambiguous scale.
Here’s an example of a leading question.
Would you be willing to try this product if you knew
it would save a thousand pounds of garbage a year?
Now most people are going to reply, “Yes, of course.”
Given the scenario described here, who wouldn’t?
Here’s an example of the difficult question.
How many times have you ridden the bus in the last year?
Answering this question accurately, is nearly impossible.
Instead, maybe try asking, how many times in the last week.
Difficult rating scales.
On a scale of one to 10,
please rate your experience of using public transportation.
So how would you define one through 10?
That's a pretty ambiguous scale that might mean something
different to everyone.
So now that we know about writing questions,
the next thing we need to figure out is,
how many people need to respond?
And there's no single answer to this question.
If you’re polling a large metropolitan area
about their transportation habits,
you’ll want a response to make sure your answers
are a representative of that entire population.
However, if you’re sending out a survey to a small business
with 20 employees, you’d need a fewer number of responses
to ensure your data is accurate.
It’s all relative to the size of the group
you're working with.
There are some online survey makers that can work great for
getting the questionnaire out to your sample audience,
and help craft the questions.
SurveyMonkey and Qualtrics are two of my favorites.
They also provide useful tools to help analyze
and visualize your results.
I suggest you check them out,
especially if you’re trying this for the first time.
A questionnaire can be a useful tool throughout the entire
design research process.
During the beginning stages of solving a problem,
they can offer a quick way to burn a hypothesis,
or provide more validation to something you’ve learned.
In the generative phase,
they can be used to gather responses to a design prototype,
and to understand how effective something is.
Surveys and questionnaires are also a fairly easy to use
and cost-effective tool.
One of their biggest advantages is that
once they're written and sent out
the research team can begin working on other tasks
while they wait for the responses.
So be prepared to wait,
and use the downtime to your advantage.