As mentioned here, I’ve finally got round to putting a survey online to capture some people’s experiences with using the Design with Intent cards. A few people have already very kindly filled in prototype versions of these questions in different contexts.

So, if you’ve downloaded the cards, or used a printed version, and you have a spare few minutes, it would be very much appreciated if you could have a go at this survey – it’s anonymous (if you like), all the questions are optional, and the whole thing should be quick to do.

Your answers will help improve future versions, as well as helping to tie up my PhD thesis. I’m aware there are lots of ways the cards could be improved and made more useful (and usable). There are some quite exciting ideas that have been suggested, which I hope to be able to explore in the future.

Depending on how many responses there are, there’ll be a few prizes for respondents drawn at random who’ve given their email address – most probably, some excellent books on design, user experience and behaviour.

Thanks for your time!

A note on surveys
Surveys are both interesting and frustrating. In design – and probably in many more social-sciencey areas of academia in general – surveys of different kinds have become very common as a way of collecting insights and generating results (which can allow the demonstration of statistical analysis skills). I appreciate how valuable they can be. But as someone who fills in a lot of surveys and questionnaires that get sent to me, I know that as often executed, they really are a pretty imperfect way of capturing what people really think. (Quite apart from all the dark pattern-y ways they can be designed to influence the way people respond, which are of course worthy of study in themselves…)

The survey here is nothing special, but I’ve tried to minimise the elements that frustrate me: Likert scales for things that are difficult to assign a rating to; multiple pages so I can’t see how much left there is to fill in; required questions or forced choices which force me into having an opinion about things I haven’t thought enough about; and lack of an opportunity for me to explain more about bits that mean a lot to me. If you’re interested, the questions are based on a kind of combination of Fred Reichheld‘s work and parts of the Kirkpatrick model.