Carsten2 (and others!)

I am feeling a bit short on knowledge about the existing customer base on LS1.x. Carsten1 sent us stats for the survey but they are really hard to read given they arent rolled up into easy-to-read results. (e.g. i dont need/want to read line by line responses).

Carsten2 (cwittenb can we call you Carsten2?) - I am wondering as a starting point for usability if we can do some customer research - can you lead this? I started a draft of the primary persona types that I believe to makeup most of the types of people using LS1.x or any survey tool. I could be wrong but it's a start - if we had some quantitative validation for this list, and could prioritize these users, we'll have a better product. docs.limesurvey.org/tiki-index.php?page=...urvey+2.0+User+Types has a list that we started - it is based on my understanding (assumptions) of survey tool users, the requirements MITRE has, some real world discussions with marketing people, and discussions with Harvard University's IQSS department (PHD types with heavy research interest in survey methodology). Are you familiar with author Steve Mulder's "The User is Always Right? A Practical Approach to Building Personas."? It would be great to arrive at something along those lines so that we're aren't designing for the imaginary 'elastic' user and only relying on developer interests or feedback-after-its-built to understand how we can best satisfy real people out there.

thanks,
Brian

hey brian

I couldn't agree with you more!
I've worked with personas on serveral projects (more in the line of Caroll's Scenrio-Based Design) and they are a great method in particular for early develoment stages and especially for distributed teams.
Even more, your suggestion to confirm our understanding of users empirically is fantastic.
I'm wondering if we could use limesurvey itself to collect data about users and advertise it here in the forum and on the university mailing-lists.
If you, Juhan and Carsten agree I would be happy to design a questionnaire and build personas from the collected data and our brainstorming notes.

Is there any data, like MITRE's requirements that you could make available to me/the rest of the team?

I'll just finish with my remarks on limesurvey 1.x and go straight to work.

... please call me cwittenb or Carsten2, or whatever you like

carsten2 - fabulous!

Juhan can talk to you (email him directly) about MITRE specific people. We probably have that base down pretty well though and may not need personas specific to mitre since their needs are well understood.

Carsten1 has a survey already that may be a start for what you want: ask him directly for access to the reports and see if he can install the graphing tool he mentioned to me in a previous email - otherwise, its a line-by-line review of the responses which sucks and doesnt help us get rollup data as we need.

b

We're collating the requirements on the LS2 dev wiki:
docs.limesurvey.org/tiki-index.php?page=...rvey+2.0+Development

Feature requests and suggestions should start on our draft LS2 requirements page:
http://docs.limes.../tiki-index.ph...eSurvey+2.0+Requests

-Juhan

if there is already such a survey and data from Carsten1 I can do the job of analysing the data from the SQL export and build nice charts from it - I'm a psychologist, that's what I'm used to do. I will email Carsten1 to ask him about it.
Thanks for the info, I will report back soon!

... ah and another issue - we are starting to discuss more and more development stuff for the next version in this forum.
Although this content should also be public of course, maybe this is kind of disturbing for people coming here to get support?
- so it may be better to use the mailing list, or a separate developer forum?
Just a thought that came to my mind, if you disagree I'm totally fine with keeping everything one place.

Hi!
Keeping it here would be good. Why not being open and public?
The forum subject is clear and I do not see why this would scare away users. The only disturbing thing here are our avatars

I didn't want to say anything against the public, just about the general interest of these discussions for the user seeking support for problem XY, but it was just a thought - let's keep it here.

...

I have an account for the LimeSurvey-User-Survey now and the data from 9000 datasets is already on my machine, so I will prepare some nice looking figures from the evil numbers. (Thanks Carsten!)

Additionally, I will think about some modifications to the survey in order to collect more data about the background of our users and their goals in using limesurvey.
I will post my ideas for open discussion and then we can improve the survey.

I posted my quick-review of LimeSurvey1.53+ here:
docs.limesurvey.org/tiki-index.php?page=LimeSurvey+2.0+Requests
I case this is not the optimal place, feel free to move it around.
I hope it is helpful

Just a short question: why do you refer to 1.53+ and not 1.70?