Gathering Feedback

This morning I responded to a survey for Evernote and what I think of it, what they could do better, and the like. It was a very well designed survey both from a survey design perspective and a usability perspective. When I finished it, I followed the URL back to the service that hosts it and was pleasantly surprised with what I found. It was built by a company called, Typeform. It got me thinking of ways we could be doing more consistent and continuous outreach for information from the people we serve on campus. I know all about survey fatigue, but I am wondering how many people would take the time to fill out a survey every now and then — especially if the point is to improve specific areas of service offerings on campus. To that end I built a short survey that you can get to below or by following the link. It deals with printing services and what attitudes look like around campus. Give it a try!

8 thoughts on “Gathering Feedback

  • January 29, 2014 at 9:15 pm
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    That was a simple and succinct survey experience. We have access to Qualtrics (stonybrook.edu/qualtrics) which I really like as well. I used it to find out how our population was using RDP. The biggest challenge to participation was due to the fact that our community is so well trained to guard against phishing e-mails. I even received some phone calls as did Client Support from users checking on the legitimacy of it. This is a good thing, by the way! So any survey would need to be well publicized through various channels and some type of identifier or seal can be displayed that is not easily spoofed by phishers.

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  • January 30, 2014 at 9:41 am
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    That was a very nice and easy survey, and I agree with Matt about its simplicity. What do the results look like? One potential issue that survey software suffers from is scale. With minimal questions, any system seems to work, but as the list of questions grow, the complexity of the programming increases. Simple changes to question order can be severely problematic for the survey logic.

    And Matt, we have been training our users to be wary of phishing schemes, but not so quick to train those that send out email about making sure the information is properly identified as legitimate. Poor grammar and a lack of proper greetings or closing and other identifying information is an instant trigger.

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    • January 30, 2014 at 10:07 am
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      Mark and Matt … thanks for the comments. Several items in both comments jump out at me. The first is that we are making progress in helping people understand the potential ills of clicking links blindly in emails — that is progress. Mark’s point of us not doing the same for the senders of email messages seems to be incongruent and something for us all to work towards.

      I love the idea of being able to quickly grab data points (even small ones) from people. This silly little survey embedded in a non-publicized blog post has yielded 12 responses in the last 12 hours or so. Nothing to base any sort of decision on, but if we could socialize the idea that collecting quick bits of data can lead to better question asking I think it is progress. The results are interesting so far — staff say less printing and all but one student say to keep it the same.

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  • January 30, 2014 at 1:21 pm
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    I think we have been doing a much better job of asking for feedback, through our larger surveys, I do think that these shorter surveys are a great idea. We should make sure we promote them on our website.
    I do think we need to do a better job publishing the results and responding to the feedback faster and more openly.

    PS Did Shady beat me?

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  • January 30, 2014 at 1:39 pm
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    My iPad is getting old. :p

    Sure, I like surveys!

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  • February 11, 2014 at 11:22 am
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    Neat. Is there an option to share the results in real time? This would be easy and fun option to use for the purposes of student engagement.

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    • February 11, 2014 at 11:39 am
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      I can see the results in real time in the dashboard, but I cannot see a way to embed them easily. Not surprisingly, more than half think we are giving the right number of free pages.

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