Survey Design

Preamble: The design of this survey will be guided by a number of factors. The demographic of the respondents, the information that the project needs to glean from the respondents and the instrument for delivery. Because of resource constraints, the latter is pretty much fixed at this point: Email via the Announce lists. This has distinct disadvantages in terms of our sample but it's what we have to work with at this point in time. The results will tend to be slewed but there's not a lot we can do to alleviate that given that the information is needed in the short term rather than longer.

The first part will be pre-notification sent out to the announce lists, with reply-to set to the marketing list or ideally a private list set up just for period of the survey to maintain anonymity for the respondents.
All people who respond to that mail will be then sent the full questionnaire. Pre-notes always give better response levels.

Questions will obviously be either marketing oriented, UX oriented or community oriented. At this point my feeling is that we should lean toward UX, this to demonstrate that the project is open to listening to the wider user community. Obviously there will be some crossover into the other areas but I think the broad focus should be UX. (My opinion, open to discussion.)

Before we get into detail however the Goals of the survey need to be established: What would we like the respondents to tell us, ie: Branding, User experience, future directions. Are we after cold fact or opinion.
And what do we want the survey to tell the respondents (surveys tend to tell the respondents a lot about the surveyor). There will have to be a number of defining questions that tell us a bit about the respondent but only insofar as narrowing of demographics: age, broad location, NL, usage type(Home, work or study).

Survey completed by Feb 1 2013 or thereabouts

The following are headings of the sort of we could be asking about.  These are in no particular order or preference or indeed, in the survey by default.  The design of the questionnaire will define to a degree how much data retrieval we can achieve.  The questionnaire needs to be designed to be completable in under ten minutes.  There will be allowance for "Comment" so that the respondent can expand on answers.  It should be noted at this point that best practice would require a test run with a small sample, I don't see this as feasible right now because of time constraints.

Objective data

• Age
• Native Language
• User / non user/ mixed user
• Usage: Home / Work / Study
• Obtained OOo from...?

Subjective data

Brand

• Name
• Look & Feel
• Logo

UI

• Improvements
• Annoyances

Community

• Help
• Ease of access
• Access where: Lists/Forum/Gmane
• Website

Proposed text:

As many of you would know by now, Oracle have transferred ownership of OpenOffice.org to the Apache Software Foundation, where it will be known as Apache OpenOffice.  Apache is a well-established and respected member of the Open Source community and has, under the foundation's umbrella, dozens of open source projects.  For instance, Apache HTTP server drives over 60% of the servers on the internet.

This signals a new beginning for the OpenOffice community. The new community is growing at a fast rate and a lot of work by a dedicated team has been done behind the scenes to migrate the web site and associated services over to Apache infrastructure. Signs of this are visible now with the http://www.openoffice.org website now moved entirely to Apache-hosted servers. While this has been going on, development on the OpenOffice code has proceeded and we are now looking at a release of Apache OpenOffice 3.4 with some exciting new developments in the very near future.

However, looking into the future we need help, from you the users and stakeholders of OpenOffice. We want you to tell us the direction you want us to take OpenOffice into the future. To this end we are surveying as many people as we can to find what you think should define the new Apache OpenOffice. If you would like to participate in this survey and make your voice heard then simply reply to this email and we will send out a questionnaire. Results of the survey will be posted to the announce list.

Thanks for your attention and your response.

Graham Lauder
Apache OpenOffice(Incubating) Project Management Committee.

Resources:
http://www.stats.govt.nz/surveys_and_methods/methods/survey-design-and-data-collection/guide-to-good-survey-design-2nd-edition.aspx My survey bible, caution really gruesome PDF production and geared to Govt depts
http://www.surveysystem.com/sdesign.htm Survey System Design guidelines
http://help.surveymonkey.com/euf/assets/docs/pdf/SmartSurvey.pdf?noIntercept/1SurveyMonkey Smart Survey guidelines PDF
http://help.surveymonkey.com/euf/assets/docs/pdf/Response_Rates.pdf?noIntercept/1 SurveyMonkey response rates advise PDF