Drafting the survey --

As a member of the committee that will likely be responsible for deriving something useful from the results of the ethnography project, it's been interesting being involved in the discussions about the types of questions we should be asking in our initial survey and how we should be asking them. Since the ultimate goal of the project is to redesign the Rutgers University Libraries' website, it's been a challenge to come up with questions that will actually help us toward that goal. Being neither an ethnographer nor a statistician, my perspective on the questions is based on my experience as an information services librarian and as a member of the committee that works with the webmaster to design and maintain the website.

The first consideration in any survey should probably be to try not to scare people away from responding by asking too many questions. I've visited lots of survey sites only to find that they were asking too much of my time for little or no reward. We're entering respondents in a drawing for some nice prizes, so there is an incentive for them to complete the survey, but that's not a license to overwhelm them with questions.

The second potential pitfall to keep in mind is “library speak.” Librarians as a group tend to use terminology that may not be familiar to the average library user. Survey questions need to be written in plain English. If they can't understand the questions, they won't be able to answer them in a useful manner.

So what kinds of questions can we ask students that will be meaningful when we begin the actual redesign process? There are some basics that need to be included along with the questions that I consider the real focus of the survey. We’ve included questions that will:

• identify the status of respondents (e.g., class year, campus, discipline, etc.), both so that we can look for perspectives from different audiences, and so that we can select a representative sample for the interviews that will follow;
• determine how experienced respondents are at doing research/using the existing Libraries' website;
• find out what technologies students are using so we know what we're designing for;
• find out what students are using and not using on the existing site (or if they're using it at all); and,
• find out what they'd like to see that's not on the site (or find out what's already on the site that they don't know about).
  

We’re also using a variety of question formats – pick lists, Likert scales, yes/no, comment boxes, etc. – that I think keep the survey from being too tedious.

That's a very general picture of the survey instrument, not yet in final form as of this writing. The intent is to make the most of the limited number of questions we're using in this first stage of the project. We'll get feedback from the largest number of users here, but supplementary interviews of some students will allow us to follow-up with more in-depth questions.

I'm still not sure how all of this will translate into a website redesign. At this point it really seems to be as much about figuring out the process as it is about looking ahead to achieving a useful end result.