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August 23, 2004

We've Got Questions, You've Got Answers

A major part of my project here involves doing primary research. Basically, this means I have to go to customers and ask them a bunch of questions. While there's a lot of ways that you can conduct primary research - customer visits, focus groups, conjoint testing - my chosen tool this time around is a Web survey, deployed to a bunch of folks across the United States.

Creating a survey is a lot of work. First you have to figure out what you want to know. Then, you have to find a good way of asking questions that get at the heart of what you're interested in. This is an exercise both in linguistics (e.g., "That depends on what your definition of is is...") and psychology (e.g., if you ask a person something straight-out, like "are you a nice person?", are they going to be honest with you?). You also have a bunch of programming and logical challenges to make sure that people who respond to your survey are asked only those questions that make sense for them (e.g., if someone tells you they're a non-smoker in question #1, it's just stupid to ask them what brand of smoke they prefer in question #2).

I mean, consider the person filling out the survey. This guy or gal has a job somewhere, and is busy with their day. They get an e-mail from a service that invites them to "come help shape the next generation of Microsoft software!" They click the link and are then asked a series of questions about some topic that they may - or may not - have ever spent any time thinking about.

The challenge is to write questions that this busy person can understand and respond to without becoming frustrated and closing their Web browser.

The survey process took me several weeks. This involved the creating of the questions, coming up with a good, logical flow for them, and then working with other groups here in Microsoft to make sure the questions we're asking are going to give answers those groups find valuable. I then test-fired the survey over the phone with some non-Microsoft people to get their reactions (valuable, because a few of the more brain-dead questions got cut). And then the thing was turned into the Web questionnaire, in all its HTML-rendered glory. Two internal beta cycles to debug the thing, and, as of Friday - it launched.

One awesome thing about doing surveys over the Web is that they're immediate. People literally started responding within minutes of the survey deployment. Results poured in all weekend, and have been coming all day long. It's cool to see people giving us the data we need to get this project done. It's cool to think about how this information will be used to impact product development.

And, finally, it's cool to click refresh in my browser window and watch the complete count spiral up, and up, and up...

Posted by Gavin Shearer at August 23, 2004 7:43 PM. Posted to MSFT.

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