Designing and developing surveys on WWW sites

This paper presents a review of recent WWW surveys, recommends guidelines for the preparation of a customer satisfaction survey, and describes new directions for surveys and technical considerations for the retrieval and storage of survey responses. The review of the literature has been conducted in several ways: database searches, reviews of recent surveys, and browsing the web. The types of surveys being conducted on the intemet fall into three categories: surveys that determine who is using the WWW, surveys that determine customer satisfaction with the product or service, and the newest type of survey that collects research data. To the survey guidelines described by GVU, we add five guidelines for designing web customer satisfaction surveys based on reviews of recent surveys and browsing the web: (1) Begin with a clear mission statement. (2) Classify current users of the site. (3) Report the results online. (4) Limit the length of the questionnaire to no more than 25 multiple-part questions. @Limit big graphics. For research surveys the design and data collection become more complex and both need usability testing in the prototype stage. The Review Methodology To begin our review, tirst we used commercial search engines such as Alta Vista. Later we switched our search to PEDWORLD in order to review government sites currently conducting web surveys. We discovered that, overall, the types of surveys being conducted on the web can be classifmd into two general categories: Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage, and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To Copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Designing and Developing Surveys on WWW Sites Dr. Peter Y. Johnson Professor of Chemistry Illinois Institute of Technology 3101 S. Dearborn Chicago, IL, 60616 johnson@charlie.cns. iit.edu 312-567-3440 l Category I. Surveys whose goal is to determine who is using WWW, with what technology, and for what reasons. l Category II. Surveys whose goal is to determine customer satisfaction with the product or service. CATEGORY I SURVEYS: WHO IS USING THE WWW? This section reviews three such surveys: 1. Five WWW User Surveys conducted by the Graphics, Visualization, and Usability(GVU) Center of the Georgia Institute of Technology; 2. The CommerceNetMielsen Internet Demographics Survey; 3. The American Internet User Survey. 1. GVU’s Five WWW User Survey To test the viability of the web as a survey medium and collect preliminary data on the web population, the Graphics, Visualization, & Usability (GVU) Center at the Georgia Institute of Technology conducted five surveys. They are now conducting their sixth survey. The lirst WWW User Survey was conducted in January 1994. Subsequent surveys were conducted approximately every six months, for a total collection of responses from over 55,000 Web users. Because the users were self-selecting, the survey suffers from two problems: non-probabilistic and non-random sampling. Survey Design. The CVU survey uses a Main Launching Page to direct the user to several categories. For example, the third survey offered four categories, each one selected by the user who then completed the questionnaire associated with the category and submitted it to the site. The total number of questions was 138 across the four categories. Very few users completed all four questionnaires. The purpose of using sub