Survey Experiments
With so much to learn about my target market for Flam Swiss, I’ve been making use of surveys to find out who my site visitors are.
Wufoo is great, but I only had 1 response when visitors were asked to visit a link in order to fill out my Wufoo survey form. When I decided to embed the Wufoo form directly in my webpage I got 12 responses. So much better! However, Wufoo wasn’t built to be used for surveys, and I found it difficult/impossible to match the embedded wufoo form to my site’s design.
There are many questions I want to ask my website visitors, and I’ll be adding more constantly, so I needed something different than a traditional form, where I can roll out questions as I think of them. Also:
- It needs to allow visitors to answer one question at a time (no need to answer all questions and then submit)
- Some questions should only show when a previous question is answered in a certain way
Being a programmer is both a blessing and a curse because I feel compelled to do everything myself. I wanted a simpler survey system, so rather than look for an existing solution and instead of trying to bend Wufoo to meet my needs, I created one myself in an evening: last night. You can see it here, on the right side of the site.
Conclusion
Even one click away is asking too much of your visitors. You shouldn’t ask people you have no prior relationship with to go out of their way in order to fill out a survey.
Worth noting: I haven’t been 100% methodical with my surveys. It looks like I took down the link to the wufoo form on September 6th, and I can only assume I put it up some time in the Spring of 2009. If it was up for 3-6 months, and I only got 1 response, that’s not good. Granted, I was only averaging about 4 visit per week for that period, and now I’m getting somewhere around 10.
Embedding survey questions directly in a site is a great idea. I’ll be sure to remember that approach for the next time a client requests that we add a survey to their site. I think that, in most cases, it’s preferable to a popup or modal window. Giving people a chance to read through and parse your site before blasting them with an unwanted distraction and they will be more likely to give you feedback.
You could even supplement a set of on-page questions with a link or popup that appears if they answer all of the questions as a sort of reward to users that seem genuinely interested in helping you out.
With regard to your cadence site, you might want to consider learning more about your audience than what you are currently asking. Asking them what their background is (student musician, paid faculty, etc.), and how they obtain their cadences (which print catalogs and website?) might help you understand who out there is looking for cadences.
I’m assuming you are using Finale or Sibelius or something like that to compose. Have you considered buying a sample library of marching band percussion and using the MIDI file that those programs can export along with a sequencer program such as Cubase or Sonar to create cadence demos with a fuller and more expressive sound? I think that polishing up your demos could win you more purchases.
Oh, and lovers of percussion-heavy music will do well by becoming familiar with Nigerian Fuji music ;]
http://listen.grooveshark.com/#/song/Refined_Fuji_Garbage/21918785
John David,
Using the survey questions to find out more about my audience is great advice. Because really, I don’t know much about how drumlines acquire cadences these days. Not knowing who I should be targeting, plus the fact that I feel out of touch with the current state of marching percussion (and the high school drummers themselves), makes things even more difficult for me.
I’m actually using a few open source tools, my own marching percussion notation (which gets converted into formats understood by those open source tools), and a soundfont of marching percussion instruments I found online. I have considered buying professionally recorded samples/soundfonts (and I actually did, but it’s for non-commercial use … more about that mixup here).
Last night I wrote in-depth about how my toolset came about. That post is here.
On November 8 I started using another tool to create wav/mp3 files from MIDI+soundfont, and it resulted in a much better sound. I imagine you heard the updated versions… the previous demos were even worse! So cold and empty. In the new ones you can tell the samples were made in a gymnasium (at least that’s what it sounds like to me).