Hello, I am a 3rd year student currently studying product design/design engineering in Manchester and have selected to do my final year project on outdoor living. I am specifically looking into improving the comfort associated with outdoor living.
It would be very helpful if you could participate in a quick 2 minute survey so that i can get an insight into your experiences with comfort and the outdoors.
Survey link - https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/HHXRX38
If you have any information about your experiences, problems and issues i'd be interested to hear about them in the comments
Your survey is only going to generate a set of % relating to each question, as the only useful analysis is limited to answers based on age and gender.
You have not given respondents an opportunity to state what outdoor living means to them e.g. BBQs in the garden, camping, caravanning, motorhoming etc. Answers to questions such as 'Staying dry' are going to vary significantly. Without knowing this, answers will be so generalised as to have no useful application.
Thanks for your constructive criticism, it's the first survey I've made so i knew it was going to brilliant. Since i have to design something i thought it may of been useful for identifying a potential product area with some justification for design. I shall take the survey down now.
I did not intend to shoot you down at all - please don't be disheartened! I get to build surveys fairly regularly, and its not easy. You have to be very clear in your own mind what the survey objective is, and what it is you want to find out. And of course view the questions from the respondents point of view so that they understand them. I would recommend you avoid 5 point scales too as these are rather coarse and force respondents too far in either direction. 10 point is better.
Try age, gender, type of outdoor living, region in the uk, income band - anything you think that might influence the respondents perception of what comfort and outdoor living means. Then your analysis will be more interesting and informative. Good luck with it
Your feedback was much appreciated, i spoke to my tutor today and he agreed with you. He told me that the survey was very ambiguous in what it actually was asking of the user. When i asked him how to identify a potential product area for design (which was my aim of the survey), he said that i should change the wording of "How well would you rate your experience with each following whilst living outdoors?" to "How well are your needs catered for with the products currently available on the market in relation to...?"
He also said to change my points such as "Food & Drink" to "The preparation of hot food outdoors" as to remove ambiguity, picking points that i know are related to user comfort.
I'd then follow this up by changing "How strongly would you agree that ................ influence(s) the comfort you experience whilst outdoors?" to "How important are each of the following to you whilst outdoors". By doing this Hopefully it would identify some areas that are important to users yet aren't particularly well catered for.
Ideally he wants me to talk to several people who participate regularly in outdoor living asking them about their experiences, problems and issues relating to comfort. Then make another survey based upon my feedback focusing on a certain area, finding out if others have the same views on the problem area. Breaking it down further into what exactly what aspects they don't feel are up to scratch.
Given your knowledge and experience surrounding surveys do you think this would be beneficial and i'm on the right path? Sorry for the long winded response
There is a method to the construction. For consumer surveys, this would start with a number of focus groups comprising no more than 12 persons. The objective is to elicit from them as many factors as possible that are important to them is relation to what you are researching.
If there are many, these would have to whittled down. In telephone surveys, respondents have a tolerance of approx 20.
Now use these factors to to question your respondents about 'How satisfied or dissatisfied are you with...', followed by the same questions again, this time 'How important or unimportant is...' both using 1 to 10 scales. Then you can add questions about 'How much do you agree...'; 'How likely are you to recommend...'and so on. You could have some closed questions too, along with some demographics. Beware the novice trap of of asking 2 questions in one, and keep questions short!
Compare the satisfaction scores with the importance scores to find the biggest gaps / whats most important to people. The top 3 or 4 will be the areas to address, until the next survey.
It should not be necessary to construct 2 surveys if the original is designed properly - commercially you could not charge a client twice...
You might get some ideas from survey sites that do shorter punchy quick fire surveys, rather then the traditional style above - depends what you want. Here's one of the better ones, but you will have to register..
I don't think any one minds doing these surveys for students providing the right questions are asked. Some of the students seem to want to re-invent the wheel. However it would be nice to get some feedback from the student on whether our suggestions helped them
Thank you Chris! The information you have provided has been extremely helpful and i will be sure to create my next survey differently using the methods you have identified.
I am glad people are willing to help Ian, thank you :) I am more than willing to give you guys feedback on how the project is going. I am open to any suggestions based upon how you think, or anyone else thinks their time outdoors could be improved through the products they use. Any information given will be very useful.
From looking at some of the products on the market i have noticed that lighting solutions outdoors whilst being effective are only in the form of a single lantern, torch or head torch, there is not much crossover.
A simple idea i had the other day was attempting to combine the three. A multi functional lighting solution that could be used as a lantern, torch and head torch. Having a detachable light resembling just a torch head that can attach via magnet or screw to either a head strap, torch handle/portable charger or inside a lantern base + diffuser.
It's just an idea but i thought i would share it to see your opinions :)
I'm afraid you are making the classic mistake of assuming you think you might know what people want, and building your survey around that. This is exactly why you have to ask respondents what is important to them (see the last response!) You can certainly brain storm ideas and then offer a list of these including yours, and ask respondents to rank in order of importance. This might help you to focus on a product then, besides which you will get more response if people find the product relevant to them. In this case I see why you might do 2 surveys
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Topic: Comfort Outdoors
