Low overhead high yield integrated surveys

ABSTRACT

Traditionally, a system of survey activities is often conducted as a separate process, apart from the target system, which includes explicit invitations to a predefined or randomly selected group of users, collection of data from submitted forms and compilation into various analytical reports for decision making. Such a process is expensive and time consuming. Also, since traditional surveys are often conducted after the system usage, the users' experiences with the system become somewhat detached in responding to survey invitations at a later time, causing the concentrations and interests to decrease during this period. So it is likely that they may overlook some vital areas in survey questionnaires where it is most expected for them to respond with pragmatic thoughts within the context of the system environment; thus, straying away from the actual purpose of the survey. To eliminate these difficulties, the integration capabilities of any computer-based system can be carefully utilized for accumulating system usage data, workflow path traversal, calculating various feature ranks, as well as light-weight feedbacks at users' own will while they are using the system. In addition, displaying significant real-time system usage statistics, as well as historical data at relevant areas in the system workflow enables the users to be more aware of the dynamicity of the system components, which implicitly encourages them to drop few responses to very simple questions while traversing through the system. In this paper, we propose a framework for an integrated survey mechanism for computer-based systems that is able to serve most of the purposes of conducting manual surveys for the assessment of the system itself, as well as its users.

References

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Index Terms

• Applied computing

  • Law, social and behavioral sciences

    • Sociology