Skip to main content

Usability of Online Surveys

I just got an email request to do a survey from a FAVORITE museum.  They sent me an email, addressed me as "Dear Friend". What could go wrong?

They said it would take 15 minutes.  (Which is a LOT.  A lot for anyone.  Anything more than 5 minutes is a lot.)  It took longer than 15 minutes.  I lost track when the Progress Bar hadn't moved beyond the half way point after I answered a lot of questions.

I left the tab open all day.  Checked in, did a few more answers every now and then.  Not even sure if it mattered after 5 hours.  When I got to the "Just a few quick demographic questions"  (again, not past the halfway mark on the Progress Bar).

What got to me was the BAD design of the survey.  In terms of actions and GOMS (Goals, Operators, Methods and Selections) which is essentially a way to measure how long it takes to go from a mouse to a keyboard.  If you add it up, it matters.  Especially if you have a survey with ONE QUESTION PER PAGE!  As a human, I find it insulting that I have 2 clicks per page (over more than 10 pages), one I think about and one which could be automated.

For variety, there are questions which have several columns, some items can have more than one check.  Talk about wanting to answer "I don't care now".

The survey literally made me regret telling anyone I visited the museum.  It also gave me guilt during the day and active aggression towards the end.  AND I abandoned after starting again several times, so it drained me of goodwill and left me with a feeling of having wasted my time and I am unsure if they can use what I gave them so far.

I have spent hours on the site Freerice.com, and find it simple and terribly addictive.  As with most video games or the type of gamification which increases points (which you may or may not get in real life), there is a sense of reward.  Why is that so impossible to do in surveys?

I would love to fill out addictive surveys.  Are you listening, MOMA?


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Henry David Thoreau is Alive and Well, Despite All the Murderers

Despite his famous grave at Sleepy Hollow, HDT is alive and well. There are countless books, events, plays being read, written, performed and published about him every year. The "interpretations" take on various permutations.  Live-action humans who lead educational programs, or people who write books for children.  Or, theater which extends the documented & literary materials into personal immediacy (not that I am biased, but this is what I do). Lately, there has also been a video game created about Walden. And a young graphic designer who wants to "update" Thoreau's words for the modern age.  Something about "how dated the language is" and the "inaccessibility" of its ideas.  (I can't bear to include a link, or even the designer's name for fear of adding to publicity, and thereby adding "support") The last example is the slippery slope.  At what point does he need to be repackaged, yet again? Instead of taki...
Post a Comment
Read more

Easy Moments

There are moments in everyday life when you want to tell someone something. I was on a shuttle bus and wanted to apologize to someone sitting in front of me. It would have been easy to tell him when I first got on, but I was distracted finding a seat. It would have been easy to get up at the first traffic light, when the bus was stopped. Or at the second.  Things were quiet enough for conversation too. We were about to head into the countryside, so I knew there were not many more moments. When I approached him, it was not the person I thought it was. I did feel better that I had tried. And that there was one more traffic light than I had expected.
Post a Comment
Read more

Everyday UX Ethics

This landed in my email box the other day, from a company I am always rooting for. They put on  excellent conferences and help me to keep my ideals high. Quoting from Mark Hurst's (1/15/13) blog post at Creative Good : "For years I've been fascinated by the work of Natasha Dow Schüll, an MIT professor who has studied Las Vegas gambling for many years. She gave a great talk at Gel a few years back . . . The question is unavoidable: if UX methods are effective in projects with a wide range of outcomes, which do you want to spend out your career on? Those that benefit the customer in the long term, or those that are in the long run harmful? And don't think the slot machine example is foreign to online business. Social-gaming company Zynga has been trying to enter the online gambling market. The company has always paid close attention to user behavior, and now they seek to maximize the profits from such a skill." However, the job market does not seem to ag...
Post a Comment
Read more