On Jul 31, 2006, at 10:54 AM, Gary Feldman wrote:
Kieran Lal wrote:
Hello, I would like launch a second Drupal Administration Survey this week. Here is the first one: http://www.surveymonkey.com/ DisplaySummary.asp?SID=1425065&U=142506581557 <http:// www.surveymonkey.com/DisplaySummary.asp?SID=1425065&U=142506581557>
I am looking for some volunteers to help re-design the survey and make sure the questions will lead to effective responses. The survey should help the Drupal development community understand Drupal users and the goal and needs of Drupal administrators. By mentioning both users and administrators, you're suggesting that there really should be two surveys, going to two different groups of people. Is that what you intended?
No, I should have said Drupal administrators in both cases. This effort is targeted specifically at Drupal administrators.
Can you state some more specific goals for the survey?
To understand Drupal administrators situation when they are administering, their goals, and the tasks they are trying to complete.
The first survey looks like it was trying to identify the most important activity and/or module for improvement. Is that still the goal?
The survey was part of a larger effort to improve Drupal administration. The survey specifically helped to identify tasks Drupal administrators were trying to accomplish so we could improve their ability to complete those tasks.
Or are you interested in other dimensions (e.g. the most important attributes from a list such as features, reliability, performance, ease of learning, user perceptions, etc.)?
Surveys serve a narrow purpose. They allow broad participation from the community as a whole and they help provide feedback to the Drupal core development process. I would use different user experience techniques to evaluate some of these measures. For example, I use analysis of search terms on Drupal.org and comments in the Drupal handbook to track what people are interested in and what they are having trouble learning.
Another way to phrase my question is what decisions do you hope to make based on the results of the survey?
I can't make decisions for the larger community, but I would hope that developers, consulting firms, and Drupal site owners would choose to put their resources to improving the most difficult and important tasks identified in the survey. I would use the results to direct where CivicSpace makes it's investments in improving the user experience of administering Drupal. I would encourage and validate others efforts to do likewise. For example, in the last survey we identified that making your theme work across all browsers was the most difficult Drupal administration task. If that result was validated again in this survey I'd probably post emails and contact consulting firms and customers encouraging them to fund Drupal theming improvements. In the survey I identified categorization as being the third most "Very Difficult task". I didn't understand why. I conducted a small follow up survey for a dozen people to understand why categorization was important. What I learned was the for non-profits and advocacy groups it was very important that they are able to communicate the structure of their organization and the goals of their organization through their website categorization. I also learned that these users treated categorization as three distinct tasks: managing categories, navigating by categories, organizing by categories. That lead to a review of over 20 taxonomy modules and we built a taxonomy garden to make it easier for Drupal administrator to understand how to use categories and the available modules. You can see the results of that work here: http://drupal.org/handbook/modules/taxonomy http://drupal.org/node/47822 Managing categories http://drupal.org/node/47623 Navigating by categories http://drupal.org/node/47527 Organizing content by categories I haven't had time to push for changes to categories in core yet, but I'll get around to eventually. I hope that provides some context for how the survey results are useful. Cheers, Kieran
Gary