From: Robert Klemme <shortcutter@...>
Date: 2011-03-29T17:04:51+09:00
Subject: Re: A two-minute Ruby flavoured survey to help shape a new service.

On Tue, Mar 29, 2011 at 9:34 AM, Mic P. <micpringle@gmail.com> wrote:
> Stu wrote in post #989698:
>> well this is a forum so why not have the questions entered here since
>> some of the answers may not be simple yes/no answers. Also since it's
>> a public forum the answers might help others who have the same type of
>> questions or marketing concerns. btw nice trek font.
>
> I restricted the questions to simple yes/no or multiple choice because
> it's much easier to visualise the responses. Also, if I had opened up
> the questions to allow people to enter free text then I would have been
> collecting information that isn't relevant to this specific project.

Free text is not the only alternative.  For example, the last one
could deserve more answers like "it depends" or "i don't know".  Now
you have something which you can easily visualize - but if the base
data set is a bad model of reality your good visualization buys you
nothing.

> For instance, I am only interested if rubygems.org is your primary
> source of gems. If I had allowed people to enter their own responses
> they would have inevitably mentioned other gem hosts which I would have
> only had to disregard.
>
> Also, I think it's much easier to persuade people to fill out a survey
> if it's quick and requires minimal input; hence the limited number of
> questions and answer choices.

Actually the limited choice of answers can make answering harder and
thus slower. :-)

> I didn't list the questions on the forum primarily because it would be
> much harder to collect the responses.

Clearly.  The Google Docs approach is remarkably easy and works good.

> The responses so far have thrown up some interesting facts about Ruby
> developers behaviour & preferences so once the survey is complete (I'm
> aiming for around 250 responses and I'm about 60% the way there) then I
> probably will publish the results somewhere in the hope others may find
> them useful =)

This of course is a requirement for us. :-)

Cheers

robert

-- 
remember.guy do |as, often| as.you_can - without end
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