[IxDA Discuss] Survey Dilemma

[Chris Bernard]

Quite frankly this is a terrible way to figure out which way you should go (as I beat down an MS Account Rep). It's like designing applications by vendor and package selection.

Is it possible for your team to actually conduct a contextual research effort instead? You could perhaps frame this activity as the effort to 'figure out what to ask' (partially true anyway). Do a true big-D effort and to your insights and recommendations honestly because polling end users about platform is like asking me what type of preservatives I want in my cereal.

When it comes time to rationalize this to business decision makes you can do two things. One is do a search on Roger Martin over at Harvard Business Review and get some insights into how to present design choices and research to this audience. Two is to simply use your statistics to validate the validity of your insights (As Disrali says, "There are lies, damnable lies and statistics.")

One other option is to see if you have or can get any type of session data out of how people are using your existing toolset. This might be impossible but an implementation of a sensing mechanism for whatever you go to is critical.

Chris Bernard
Microsoft
User Experience Evangelist
chris.bernard at microsoft.com
630.530.4208 Office
312.925.4095 Mobile



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-----Original Message-----
From: discuss-bounces at lists.interactiondesigners.com [mailto:discuss-bounces at lists.interactiondesigners.com] On Behalf Of bjminihan at nc.rr.com
Sent: Tuesday, August 21, 2007 1:14 PM
To: discuss at ixda.org
Subject: [IxDA Discuss] Survey Dilemma

This falls under the "other duties as assigned" category...

Our executives have asked my team (UCD & Web Analytics) to conduct a survey of "end users and business & IT stakeholders" (exact words) to collect data that will be mapped to proposals to migrate our email, calendar, web portal, team collab and real-time collaboration tools to either a full IBM stack or Micrsoft stack.  We currently use Notes for email, calendars, meetings, team collab & Sametime for instant messaging and screen-sharing.  We use BEA Aqualogic (Plumtree) for our web portal.

Our constraints are as follows:
*  Don't ask any question or publish any responses that could be construed as favoring one or the other stack.  Most people in our company want our Notes email environment to die slowly and loudly, while a significant block wants to push whole-hog for IBM

*  Focus the survey purely on how people think they want to work in the future, and their current preferences for using technology either at work or at home.

Here are reasons why I can't wrap my brain around this and find a way forward:
*  I can't figure out how to ask questions that will meaningfully reflect what people want, while completely ignoring the visceral response a large number of people have toward Notes (IBM will continue to push Notes & Quickplace into its NG workplace environments).  Note:  I have no preference either way for Notes or Outlook, but it's a valid issue with our employees.
*  I honestly don't feel that we can collect any meaningful data from questions about how people "think they want to work", as people are historically inaccurate in describing what they think they would do in the future.  My fear is that we provide a beautiful report about the "workplace of tomorrow" that reflects a set of imaginary users who will never exist.  That data will be used to justify (politically or otherwise) a decision that will completely obliterate progress we've made responding to observed behavior in the past 5 years.

--
 - Bryan
http://www.bryanminihan.com
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