Launch Day!
Well, SURVEY-launch day, anyway!
Today is the day when the finished and published (and hopefully polished!) survey which I spent the last couple of weeks refining with help from two key colleagues was finally put out into the world, where it shall gather crucial data for at least the next 30 days.
Today the actual research part of the whole UX Research process for the Alumni Project begins in earnest.
Taking the advice of many other UXers, I wanted to make sure to spend plenty of time on the thought process, rather than going for speed or visual panache. This survey represents essentially the debut of the idea of the Central City Opera Alumni Association to a much wider audience, and so making sure that it a) was well thought out, b) well executed, and c) reasonably likely to be well-received by our potential userbase was super important.
SurveyMonkey
In thinking about this survey since earlier this summer, I’d always assumed that SurveyMonkey was going to be the platform — after all, I knew others who’d used it and been very happy, it had been around as a platform for ages, and surely they’d have ironed out most (if not all) of the bugs or pain points for people like yours truly.
Long story short, after I’d finished writing and editing the questions (and thinking them out to the nth degree), I was ready to load them all onto a platform and them published within a matter of days, if not hours.
The good news is that I was amply prepared, and SurveyMonkey’s UI made it so easy to get the actual content up and ready to go that, within a couple of hours, it became clear that none of it was going to work:
“All this can be yours for just $1,188 per year! CALL NOW!”
1) For the time being, I’m self-financing this whole Alumni Project venture, and while it’s hardly expensive, it ain’t free, and I’m still job-hunting in UX land. Ergo, costs matter, and even the cheapest plan was still far beyond my reach.
2) For the free version, SurveyMonkey limited users to 10 questions. I’d already agonized for days and days about the 12 or so to which I’d managed to whittle down my list, and even after combining some of the questions, I realized in so doing I’d lose some of the depth I was going for. Deal-breaker.
3) The free version also basically held most of the data captive, making it impossible to even export to an Excel spreadsheet, let alone PDFs, etc. It meant that I wouldn’t ultimately be able to parse the data as I needed. Also a no-go.
4) The Basic Plan (i.e. the free version) also throttled views of responses to 100 max. Given what I’ve already explored in terms of how big the pool of respondents and potential users could be…. nope nope nope.
In summary, it’s a fantastic, well-developed tool, and one which I may well use in the future. But it’s not suited for even a modestly well-developed survey on a dime, so … next!
“OK, Google…”
Long story short (and a few choice search queries later), it became clear that Google Forms/Google Docs was going to be the way to go. Not terribly pretty, not much at all in the way of customization — but super simple, clear, and they weren’t trying to keep a stranglehold on the data.
I’d already nailed down the URL for this project overall many weeks ago, but other than sending visitors to a landing page on one of my other sites (nope!), I needed a free (or SUPER cheap-without-being-sketchy) hosting solution. I’m already running two professional sites on Squarespace (this one, and my singing site) and one on Smugmug, so my web hosting dollars are def maxed out for the year.
Now, it did indeed occur to me that, while they are clearly a megalopoly in terms of alllll kinds of services you might use for anything remotely related to the Interwebs, Google products also usually play very well together. So, a free (!) survey built on Google Forms became a link to Google Forms hosted (also for free!) on Google Sites, to which my shiny domain name was pointed from Google Domains (not free, but cheap, and already paid for).
"And they’re off!”
The survey itself was first promulgated via various social media channels this morning around 1100a, and as of 300p, we already have 30 very thoughtful (and passionate!) responses so far. Clearly we have a lonnng way to go before we hit numbers that I think best represent our ultimate potential userbase, but it’s a start.