[development] Drupal administration survey draft based on 10 interviews

[Kieran Lal]

On Aug 10, 2006, at 11:09 AM, Gary Feldman wrote:

> Kieran Lal wrote:
>> On Aug 9, 2006, at 7:23 AM, Gary Feldman wrote:
>> ...
>>>> New user
>>>> Non-technical user developing community or social change web  
>>>> site forced to become "accidental technologist"
>>> The nature of the web site doesn't seem relevant.  How about:  "  
>>> Non-technical user developing a web site, and becoming adept at  
>>> the technology"
>> Yes, it's very relevant.  See interviews and response to Dries.
> It seems reasonable to me to have a separate question asking people  
> to characterize the web sites on which they work.

Ok.  I do want to achieve a balance between getting enough people  
through the survey so that the Drupal community feels they have their  
interests represented in the survey and the developers and  
contributors to Drupal feel the responses are accurate enough to give  
some weight to where they put their effort.  Do we go from 10  
questions to 15?  I already added three questions based on Neil's  
early request to learn more about Drupal users.  Now we are adding  
even more.

After the last survey I did at least one micro survey on  
categorization.  I also just went and did a bunch of research in  
areas that seemed to show strong interest from the results and worked  
to get improvements into Drupal.  For example we implemented multiple  
comment administration for example.

I think we have three choices:
1) Review the relevant parts of the interviews I have posted and re- 
interpret the results of this question yourself.
2) Conduct additional interviews to gain further clarity and re- 
phrase the questions to see if the response are significantly different.
3) Go with what we have and if the results look suspicious then do  
more follow up interviews to dig deeper.

I am still looking for folks to commit to actually working to get  
this done, although the public review is definitely helpful.

Cheers,
Kieran

>> ...
>>>> What are some infrequent Drupal tasks?
>>>> (select all that apply)
>>> Ditto, but see next comment.
>>>> Add new features by adding modules or coding new features
>>>> ...
>>>> Modify site navigation
>>>> Other_______________
>>> The fact that this list differs from the preceding list suggests  
>>> that you already believe these to be infrequent.  But does that  
>>> mean that if the respondent doesn't check something, it means  
>>> that it's a frequent task, or that it's not a task at all?  Or  
>>> more to the point, what is this question trying to learn?
>> Think about the 400* options in Drupal's administration interface  
>> today.  Some should easily accessible as they are routinely  
>> accessed.  Think about the hundreds of professional Drupal  
>> consultants who live in the Drupal administration interface day in  
>> an day out.  For example logs or spam seem to be the most  
>> frequently accessed.   However, a task like clean URLs is only  
>> usually set once, but it has prominent real estate at administer  
>> >> settings.  Infrequent tasks should be tucked away in favor of  
>> more common tasks, but made easy to find during site set-up.
>>
>> The first set of questions are about understanding the users.  The  
>> second set of questions are about the situation the user is in  
>> when they are doing administration.  In general I would say that  
>> the notion of administration configuration and administration  
>> settings need to give way to: Site set-up, Site development, site  
>> testing and maintenance.  At least this is what the interviews  
>> reveal about how Drupal is actually being used.
> I certainly agree that those four categories make sense and are  
> better than the administration configuration and administration  
> settings classification.  This makes me wonder if there should be  
> two tiers of questions.  That is:
>    A:  While administering Drupal, what percentage of your time do  
> you spend doing : a) setup; b)development; c) testing; d) 
> maintenance; e) other?  (I don't know whether SurveyMonkey can  
> handle it, but my intent is that these add up to 100%.)
>    B1:  Which of these are the most common tasks during site setup?
>    B2:  Which of these are the most common tasks during site  
> development?
>    ...
>    ...
>>> Should it be something like "These are some Drupal tasks that are  
>>> done less frequently.
>> infrequent, less frequently.  Potato , Potato, Tomato, Tomato.   
>> Pick the one that is grammatically correct and let me know!
> This wasn't grammatical nitpicking (not that I'm above that :-),  
> but about the ambiguity in interpretation.  There are three  
> possibilities, frequently, infrequently, and never.  Dries's  
> suggestion of "Which of these are the LEAST common ..." solves the  
> ambiguity, but not necessarily in a way that gets the answers that  
> are needed.  I think that asking "which of these infrequent tasks  
> is most important" is one way of phrasing it.  Another might be  
> "how often do you do these", with answers such as "once a week or  
> more", "2-3 times a month", "rarely", or "in bursts, several times  
> per day or week, but then days or weeks will elapse before doing it  
> again."  I don't have strong feelings about which form of question  
> to pick, as long as it's clear how things that fall off the scale  
> at either end (either too frequently or never) are classified.
>
> Regards,
>
> Gary
>
>