How to combine surveys with other techniques
(card sorts, usability tests, field studies, web-logs,
competitive analyses)
One Strategy: Go deep, then broad, then deep again.
- Interview about 5 people, get impressions and further depth
Perhaps you could facilitate a focus group or two as a starting
insight.
- After a couple of focus group meetings, extract general
themes, generate an online survey to measure intensity, and give people a
set of standard responses to choose from, as well as an option to fill out
in-depth comments. Invite people from various communities to fill out the
online survey.
- Include in the online survey a question: Can we follow
up with an in-depth interview by telephone?
- Collate the impressions, comments, and statistical information
that gets generated from steps 1-3. From the group of people who answer the
online survey, call some number of people to go deep again.
- The value in doing the online survey may not be immediately
apparent, but it can be very helpful to get an overview of the community,
to know whether the division of opinion is more along the lines of 52 to 48%,
or more like 60-40. It's also invaluable to get a picture of different demographic
groups (such as people with advanced degrees, people who are under or over
30, people within certain regions of the country), and look at whether these
differences are linked to differences in attitudes