The current user survey (survey version 1.0.1) is more than one and a half years
old. It has gathered untill now approx 500000 answers from OOo users who clicked
on the Registraton button inside the software. Results from the survey are often
included in the OOo Newsletter.

I would like to initiate the creation of new user surveys and studies that would
be helpfull for the current OOo development status and especially for the major
2.0 release.

---
Surveys To-Do DRAFT #1:
Possible threads for discussing are (just a first thought list):

1. key questions that we always want to ask OOo users
2. questions that we would need answered by those who use other office suites
3. what are the today's OOo project decisions that would be eased by the user's
answers
4. find possible research themes on the OOo users base and develop a set of
standard questionaires for tipical situations. Eventually create a questionaires
kit and have it added to the marketing project materials (can be printed out
then for public meetings or administered online on the website).
5. gather market researchers, sociology students, etc to develop studies on OOo
users.
6. establish a schedule for replacing the online OOo user survey periodically so
that we maximize its usefullness and sincronize it with the project's evolution
and needs in the same time.

---
More can be added to this list. 
Any help, suggestions, ideas are highly appreciated.

Cristian

Here is my initial brainstorming list.

The key high-level goals I have in mind are:

1.) Get data that can help to improve the product
2.) Get data that can be used to market the product
3.) Start a relationship with potential new contributors
4.) Get data that can help to fill gaps
5.) Get data that can help to improve the overall project experience

A while ago you suggested to have a permanent part and a part that would
change every month/quarter. The permanent part would cover the basic
questions, and the other part would be used for current issues like 
community council discussions or feature feedback.

I think that would be a very good approach because it would give us some
flexibility, but also ensure that we continue to get key user data from
everybody.

We also might want to consider the option to have one survey for the
people who get there from the registration dialog and a different one
for the people who get there from the OOo home page. The people who
get to the survey through the registration dialog are probably mostly
new to the application. Whereas the other users might have more 
practical experience with OpenOffice.org.

I use the following URL as a reference point for my comments below:
http://oosurvey.gratismania.ro/user/index.php

We should keep some of the basic questions from the old survey. For example
I think we should keep the questions 1-14, 16, 19, 20, 21, and 22. 21 and 22
should be implemented using radio buttons since the questions include the
work "primarily".

We also should add a loyalty related question:
"How likely is it that you would recommend OpenOffice.org to a friend or 
colleague?"

Question 31 is good, but we should add an option for people to put in
their email addresses to register themselves to some kind of "new
contributors mailing list". Or we should redirect to a mailing list
subscription web page if people select something here.

I think it also would be very interesting to know what integrations
with other applications like SAP, Oracle, Siebel, etc. people are
missing. In the same context it would be good to know the vertical
or the industry sector of a user (finance, government, etc.) 
provided that someone uses OpenOffice.org at work.

We might even want to create a separate survey for business users.
In that survey we could also ask for the company size and experienced
or expected migration costs and problems.

Another area that we could try to explore is usability. For example,
we could ask something like "What task requires too many steps in
OpenOffice.org, and thus should be simplified?" or "What feature
do you miss most from other office suites?"

Another useful question could be to ask what office suite 
OpenOffice.org users have used before they switched and then
we could ask what the productivity is for the different
applications compared to the corresponding components in the
old office suite. For example, if a user selected 70% productivity
for Writer compared to MS Word XP this would tell us that
we have some serious usability issues. However, if the answer
was 120% usability for Calc compared to MS Excel 97 this would
tell us that we are doing great.

For companies providing add-ons, services, support, training, etc.
for OpenOffice.org it would be interesting to know what things
OpenOffice.org users need and thus would be even willing to pay
for if the quality was o.k. (templates, clipart, support, training,
training CDs, migration services, API support, custom development,
thin client solutions, etc.). This could help to create win-win
situations for both OpenOffice.org users and suppliers like
Sun, Novell, IBM, Red Hat, etc., because users would get solutions
to their problems and contributing companies could make money from
OpenOffice.org. The survey results could also give some directions
for the bizdev and marketing project.

It would be interesting to know how people get OpenOffice.org.
If they download it from the main OpenOffice.org website, directly
from a mirror site, purchase a Linux distro, buy a commercial 
product, buy a book that includes a CD, etc.

We also should include questions regarding website and communication
improvements, e.g. "What information did you not find on the
OpenOffice.org website?" and "What communication channels should
we use to keep you informed about OpenOffice.org?" (Newsletter,
OpenOffice.org home page, etc.)


Erwin

Hi,
I am updating the issue with some ideas from the initial proposal on the
dev@marketing.openoffice.org list:

For reference see: 
http://marketing.openoffice.org/servlets/ReadMsg?list=dev&msgNo=14198

Quoting:
[...]
ASKING THE RIGHT QUESTIONS:
The survey must be small enough not to bore users and therefore we must
carefully choose the questions that would provide the most usefull information.

Three selection criterias I can think of are:
1. Information that prospective users/companies are asking us the most
(when they try to document the migration for example).
2. Information that can help us measure the success of different
marketing actions.
3. Information that would help the future software development decisions
(like: X% of the OOo users would like an email client integrated rather
than... etc)
[...]

POSSIBLE SURVEY QUESTIONS/SECTIONS:
Here are some questions to start the list of possible survey questions:
- Country, language
- What OOo release they use
- Where are they using OOo ?(home, work, school)
- If used at work, how big is the company they work for ?
- Operating system
- Applications most used in OOo
- Type of user (beginner/average/poweruser)
- How did they found us
- For how long they are using OOo
--- end quote ---

Cristian

Created attachment 14947 [details]
The initial strategy proposal mentioned by Erwin (dancer) in his above comment.

As a thought, for creating a short survey that doesn't bore people, would it be
worth taking this approach:

Initial Question)

 a) Are you new to OpenOffice.org?
 b) Have you used OpenOffice.org before?

If they answer a), we give them a survey that asks questions for new users.
If they answer b), we give them a survey that asks questions that are feedback
related.  i.e. "What improvements would you like to see?", "Would you recommend
OpenOffice to others?"

Another thought, is to also have a question asking if they're a business or home
user of OOo, and give different mini surveys for each audience.

So, I guess my suggestion isn't to have one survey to apply to everyone. 
Instead we may want to figure out a way of breaking the incoming "registrations"
down into specific target groups, then lead people in a "natural" way to the
right set of questions for them.

Hope that's helpful.

:-)

Regards and best wishes,

Justin Clift

Created attachment 17425 [details]
Dinamic survey proposal by dancer. Created following up the main categories of users defined so far.

Created attachment 17426 [details]
Futher defining the plan for survey version 2 built on top of Erwin's proposal. Better definition of the survey screens and selection criterias.

Created attachment 17558 [details]
Proposed OOo survey form for 2004

Following comments from the OOo marketing team, 
I've attached my proposed survey. It includes a 
good number of questions (150+) with a clear focus 
on gathering information to help make feature
decisions for the next major version of OpenOffice.org.

It has been suggested that we should provide an option to
select a long or short survey form. I think a more effective
option is to allow users to completely skip each "page" of questions
if they do not want to answer, and also allow users to skip to the
end of the survey at any time so that they can submit their responses.

obsolete