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completed. I had to chuckle when it asked how often I "Check in." I killed my tv and social networking crap a long time ago. I'm so out of the loop! :)
mullac: No, real questions. The idea was to make it super easy to fill out and then look at the correlations between responses. Open-ended questions would be way better if people gave awesome responses, but that takes time and effort and we have nothing to offer in return except beverage futures, so we didn't think we'd get good (or any) answers to open-ended questions. Plus, we'll be following up with interviews where we can ask all open-ended questions.
So correlations.
Every user is different, and we can't design one interface to perfectly fit all users; instead we're trying to figure out who would be active early users of a service like ours so we can target them in our initial designs. Maybe when we started on this local events thing we thought that parents of elementary-school-aged children would be active users of our app. They want to expose their kids to all sorts of interesting and cosmopolitan things like Shakespeare and Kraftwerk and cooking classes and chessboxing, right? Events!
But maybe after this survey we find that parents, collectively, don't use social media nearly as much as we thought they did, and that they don't really go to things. (Too busy raising kids, maybe? We'd have no idea of the why but this early in the process maybe it doesn't matter so much.) Maybe we find, though, that 15-18 year-olds all do wish there was a better way to coordinate their events, love social media, etc. They seem like a better target.
Once we've looked at the survey results, we reevaluate who our initial target groups are, and then follow-up with people from those groups for in-person (or over Skype or something) with some more open-ended, qualitative-type questions.
Then, once we have a good idea of who our users are, and how they approach finding and choosing events, we'll build some on-paper prototypes and test them with users. And finally, we'll take the lessons from those tests and try to build the service. And then - surprise! - more testing.
It's this iterative process, and there will be several steps involving users between this survey and the final product. So if the survey doesn't get us perfect data, that's okay, because it's a small part of this interative process towards (hopefully) buidling a great UI.
On question 3 (How often do you use the following to find out about events in your area?), I see the two answers "word of mouth" and "Facebook, Twitter, other social media" as being the same thing... social media is just digital word of mouth, n'est-ce pas?
rhapsodie: social media is indeed digital word of mouth, but with that question we're really trying to get at your proficiency and comfort-level with different types of tech and social media. That's why, for our purposes, social media and "analog" word of mouth and completely different.
I might have answered the question about "if you have a smartphone" wrong, because I don't have a smartphone, but I do some of the things mentioned (post to Twitter, etc) and said so.
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