Surveys

This week in my internship I get to delve into designing and creating a survey. Easy right? Just put together a bunch of questions and have some people answer them. Well, not exactly. Perhaps in the barest form, a survey could be described as such. But figuring out which questions to ask is not easy. My definition of a survey: a form that tries to get the wanted feedback from the user without you knowing exactly what questions to ask. The user doesn't know what you want to hear, and you don't know how to get it. Brings new meaning to the phrase "double blind."

The goal of the survey I need to create is to determine what aspects of the staff site are favored and which aren't, and discover what features (if any) the staff would like to include on their site. Because of the problems that arise from too many open-ended questions (mainly problems understanding what respondents are trying to say), I've been given a limitation of only using multiple-choice questions with one open-ended question at the end. Certainly not an easy task, since I'm not in the staff's heads and can't divine what questions to ask to get the desired feedback (though wouldn't that be a useful talent to have?).

So my plan of attack has been to start with research--researching staff sites, commonly liked features, site best practices, etc. I do have a survey that was done to gather feedback for the public site that I can use as a template and a spring board for creating questions. To keep track of ideas that I or others think of, I've also created a spreadsheet of things to suggest adding to the site which will be posted for the rest of the webmasters team that works on the staff site to view and add to. It'll act as a record of ideas for site improvements that can be implemented over time (or tossed if the idea isn't a good fit for the site or the users).

About the research--there is an overwhelmingly large amount of information out there on intranets, intranet design, intranet features, and intranet best practices. I've spent about fours hours of my time this week just reading and learning about intranets, and I've barely conquered the tip of the iceberg. There are a lot of blogs out there, written by professionals and non-professional alike, about how to create a good intranet. One in particular, The Treehouse, had a series of four posts titled The Essential Intranet. Even though the MCFL's intranet already exists, there was still a lot of valuable information from Parts 1-3 that I was able to take away and use as I thought about this survey. I was also able to find pieces of wheat among the chaff in places like forums and company websites that were trying to sell a product (but happened to also include articles about various aspects of intranets). As I was looking for information on intranet features (to see if some could be included in the survey to gauge interest), I found a free short e-book titled 101 Intranet Ideas. Not only that, but I was also able to get some information about a study called the Social Intranet Study done in 2011 that looked at many aspect of intranets and the companies that have and use them. And all this wasn't even a fifth of what I read through (which isn't even a thousandth of what's out there). Needless to say, you can definitely find a lot of literature on the subject.

So there was a lot to absorb and mull over. And since I had never created a survey before, I also looked at some sources that provided survey creation help, and found a couple that were specifically for intranet surveys. I even found an unlikely source in HowTo.gov on their page titled Basics of Survey and Question Design. It provided a lot of survey "basics," and I definitely used the information there while I was trying to create survey questions on Survey Monkey (the survey creator used by the MCFL). I'm fairly happy with what I've created so far--and I'm trying hard to stay away from any double-barreled questions, leading questions, questions with built-in assumptions, and questions that leave out a response choice (basically, all the pitfalls noted on the HowTo.gov page).

Hopefully, I'll get some feedback soon--with a survey like this, there's lots to learn!