#25931
Building Effective Customer Surveys
Well-designed customer surveys can yield valuable information for your business. Unfortunately, though, a poorly worded survey can set you marching off in exactly the wrong direction. Below are some tips on designing surveys to get reliable, useful data.
#20291
Conducting Mail, Telephone, and Online Surveys: 1998 
While surveys appear surprisingly easy to plan and conduct, they are fraught with pitfalls for the unwary. That said, technical communicators can use surveys as a tool to enhance their understanding of audiences, assess the effectiveness of their communication products, and determine the value of technical communications to their company--if they follow wellestablished social science and communication science methodologies. This workshop will provide you with the foundations you need for developing, conducting, and managing surveys; analyzing the data, interpreting surveys and reporting your results.
Zimmerman, Donald E. STC Proceedings (1998). Articles>Usability>Methods>Surveys
#20750
Conducting Mail, Telephone, and Online Surveys: 1999
While surveys appear surprisingly easy to plan and conduct, they are fraught with pitfalls for the unwary. That said, technical communicators can use surveys as a tool to enhance their understanding of audiences, assess the effectiveness of their communication products, and determine the value of technical communication to their company--if they follow well-established social science and communication science methodologies. This workshop will provide you with the foundations you need for developing, conducting, and managing surveys; analyzing the data, interpreting surveys and reporting your results.
Zimmerman, Donald E. STC Proceedings (1999). Articles>Usability>Methods>Surveys
#23878
How the Usability SIG Survey Was Developed
Although I had extensive experience creating surveys and analyzing survey results, working on a Usability SIG and an Employment and Salary Survey taught me a lot about a new survey tool.
Kleid, Naomi A. Usability Interface (2003). Articles>Usability>Methods>Surveys
#19194
Methods and Guidelines to Avoid Common Questionnaire Bloopers
Over the years, I’ve often heard colleagues say 'let’s throw a questionnaire together and find out what our users think about our product.' Implicit in this statement is the assumption that questionnaires are easy to design, administer, and analyze. This assumption is far from the truth.
Wilson, Chauncey E. Usability Interface (2003). Articles>Usability>Methods>Surveys
#29869
Online Surveys for the STC Carolina Chapter and Usability SIG
This paper discusses the processes used to develop two online STC surveys: the 'Employment and Salary Survey' conducted by the STC Carolina Chapter, Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, and the 'Member Survey' conducted by the STC Usability SIG. Both surveys were available during the winter of 2003. This paper also highlights results from these surveys to demonstrate findings that online surveys can provide. Throughout this paper, we offer suggestions that other groups can apply to their survey efforts, including working methods to employ, types of questions to ask, ways to increase response rates, and approaches to verify and describe the respondent sample.
Kleid, Naomi A. STC Proceedings (2004). Articles>Usability>Methods>Surveys
#28726
Seeking an Accessible and Usable Survey Tool
When we set out to survey members of the AccessAbility SIG of Society for Technical Communication (STC), we needed an accessible tool to live up to the SIG's name and charter. Free was also a nice price tag.
Mardahl, Karen and Lisa Pappas. Usability Professionals Association (2007). Articles>Usability>Methods>Surveys
#33344
QUIS: The Questionnaire for User Interaction Satisfaction
Subjective evaluation is an important component in the evaluation of workstation usability. We have developed and standardized a general user evaluation instrument for interactive computer systems. The methods of psychological test construction were applied in order to ensure proper construct and empirical validity of the items and to assess their reliability. A hierarchical approach was taken in which overall usability was divided into subcomponents which constituted independent psychometric scales. For example, subcomponents include character readability, usefulness of online help, and meaningfulness of error messages. Evaluation on these scales is assessed by user ratings of specific system attributes such as character definition, contrast, font, and spacing for the scale of character readability.
