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Bruce Byfield wrote:
There's actually one good reason for asking basic questions: Basic
questions are non-threatening. People are used to answering and do so
automatically.
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That's a really good point. But I wonder if it holds up in practice??? Just wondering.
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John Posada wrote:
Or, like me, I've lost patience and never got to the juicy questions.
Questions don't threaten me...I've never had one punch me in the mouth
and if I have to answer the question but don't want to, I'll lie.
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But John, you've already proven yourself a capable human being with a healthy ego and sense of self. There are people, however, who do not have either of these, and these people may feel threatened from just about anything. As someone else pointed out, it's a personal thing, which you can't really take into account with a canned survey. You can with interviews though.
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Bruce Byfield also wrote:
In fact, there's a good case to be made that every questionnaire is
hopelessly biased from the start, because the sample is only taken from those who are willing to answer questions.
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This is called self-selection (or self-sampling I think), and it is one of the many problems that can totally skew survey results. The problem is that in such a survey you can never really know if the people who are taking the survey are respresentative of your actual target population because the people who respond to self-selected surveys typically have a strong opinion on the topic and want to express that opinion. The survey could then indicate that X number of people believe Y, when in fact, W number of people belive Y, or X number of people actually believe Z.
As far as surveys go, I found the following FAQ with a quick google search. It looks pretty good.
I did a search on "designing surveys" and came up with a lot of good hits, so you should be able to find something useful in those.
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Geoff Hart wrote:
Because architects are oblivious to the
fact that women and men are "setters and pointers", respectively...
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setters and pointers, huh? I'll have to remember that one. That's almost as cool as infonesia but is far funnier. :-)
Now, for the original post, if you're just looking for demographic data as a starting place, you could ask for department, job title, function, typical tasks, number of times they use the product during the day, and (mostly useless, but always a nice reality check) do you know how to access the documentation and do you use it. All but the last two will start to get information about your users that is relevent to your product but is still demographic in nature, they are non-threatening questions (everyone has a job title, right), and shouldn't take long to answer. The last two questions are mostly to find out if part of your job will also be raising awareness about the documentation in general.
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