Assignment 1:
Infosys 271: Lecture 1: Assignment 1
(a) Group Assignment: (Due 9/6)
Think of two usability problems. At least one of the problems should be amenable to survey research and a possible candidate for your upcoming survey project. Read up an article or two about it if you need to. Find an aspect of it that interests you. Design a study. Give me an IV, DV, possible confounding variables and how you will control them. Describe how you will measure the DV, and give the scale of measurement.
Draw out the design for me. Use as few words as possible in describing the design. I don’t want a report.
(b) Complete this survey: http://siva.bpa.arizona.edu/ec_survey/
Think about it from the perspective of someone who will be designing a survey in the next weeks.
(c)Evaluate survey software: Software for surveys: test and compare. Each team will evaluate some of the software. Download and test it by creating and deploying a survey. (Due: Friday 9/8). On the 8th, each team will make a five-minute presentation in class, describing candidate software for the survey project.
Criteria for evaluation:
1.) Web Based
2.) Deployment method (Web Based/email based)
3.) Free (at least for academics)
4.) Gives back data in tab/comma/space separated file (make sure it does not give back just summary graphs)
5.) Supports question formats
6.) Can support random ordering of questions
7.) Supports versioning of survey (creating different versions of same survey to send to different users)
8.) Rate ease of filling out survey (for respondent) on a scale of 1(very difficult) to 10 (very easy)
9.) Rate ease of survey development(for researcher) on a scale of 1(very difficult) to 10(very easy)
10.) Rate the look of the survey interface on a scale of 1(not sophisticated) to 10(very sophisticated)
If you can think of some other useful criteria, please share it on the class list. Also I now have a standardized excel sheet for doing the ratings. Feel free to use it.
Team Membership:
In my current understanding (based on emails I have received) there are three teams. Below is the composition of the teams. I am going to refer to the teams using the names of the team member first in the list. There are still a few people I have not heard from. I am going to assume that there are only three teams and the rest of the people have dropped out unless I hear from them. The below assignment will not change!
If your team is not on the below list, get in touch with me ASAP! I will find some other candidate software for you to evaluate.
Team Composition (as of Sept. 2)
Kirsten and others team
Kirsten , Jennifer, Sacha, Yisong
Jason and others team
Jason, Miriam, John, Hesham, Francis, Michal
Ame and others team
Ame, Monica, Danyel, Humberto, Rachna
Here is the list of software with the team assignment. Some of the candidate software you should be able to reject outright (e.g., if it is not free). So the actual evaluation should be for fewer. You can find the url's on my webpage: http://www.sims.berkeley.edu/~sinha/surveys.htm