2014 Year-End Survey Public Results (Posted Serially)

[Tay]

Hey everybody,

 

I'd like to thank everyone who took the time to take our 2014 Year's End Survey. We've received a lot of excellent input, and as I start going through and analyzing the data I'll do my best to publish it publicly for everyone to inspect. Not necessarily just because I think transparency is good or that the community will find this interesting, but because the caliber of responses we received certainly deserve public discussion. I have >80 pages of feedback, suggestions and input from this survey, and I really can't thank you enough.

 

The files I publish publicly (here on this board) are somewhat modified from what I'm providing to our leadership board: I intended the essay questions (the optional fill-in-the-text-box responses) to be for myself and the leadership council to analyze and discuss. They very well could be made public later a few weeks down the road, but they aren't included in this (or the upcoming) public brief documents. So far there's nothing incendiary in them (in fact, there's a great deal of hilarity) (you have my thanks -- analyzing this stuff isn't always exciting work), but there is a lot to unpack. That's the only reason for not including them just yet.

 

I've got a little history in statistics, but I didn't design this survey to be a scientific metric. Some of the questions were poorly worded, and the reach of the survey wasn't intended to be comprehensive. Some examples:

1. On the survey I asked how many people were aware that Nayleen had coded the front site. Had I been thinking I would have realized how dated that piece of trivia actually is, and reworded the question to directly ask how many users were aware that Nayleen is our webmaster and more or less works alone keeping us afloat
2. Several users took the survey multiple times. I'm glad to say that I was able to detect these repeat surveys and did average their scores (any quantitative answers were averaged (wasn't hard, repeat surveys were all 100% identical) and the most articulate of the essay questions were retained while the other repeats were discarded), but it does represent a weakness of the survey. I don't think this is avoidable, as the survey was done voluntarily without compensation
3. Another weakness: I specifically required forums registration to take the survey (a user had to post in a specific thread, requiring a forums account). This was done because I wanted to tease out core users (not because I didn't want a comprehensive accounting of site usage, but because I wanted core users' feedback in the second half of the survey)
4. There are suggestions in the data that the population of users who took the survey are predominantly core Fuwanovel users -- those who keep up on the forums, read and are aware of community projects, and are somewhat acclimatized to the western VN landscape. 

 

Some final points:

#1 - There are several more instances of poor questions on the survey. I'll try to point them out as they occur to me. I wrote the survey on my own, so I take full responsibility for it.

 

#3, 4 - The first file going public focuses on general site usage and awareness. As you read it please recall that due to the population who took the survey, it's probably not wise to extrapolate too much from the results. As I've said to the Leadership Council, however, the results are still non-trivial and deserve careful consideration. It's still the weakest part of the survey, however. Once the second half of the survey (the feedback sections) begins to roll out,  I think we'll all be very glad that this survey honed in on the core userbase. These are the sorts of people who keep the pulse of the community and whose feedback is most valuable to us as we work on finalizing reforms.

 

 

 

This thread will be updated as new sections of the survey are rolled out to the public. Links to each of the documents will appear in this first post, but I will post replies to alert the community when new documents have launched. Feel free to discuss the results in this thread, however.

 

Lastly: this survey touches on lots of sensitive issues. Like I said -- with 80+ pages of feedback we're bound to run into issues that bother us. I'm asking members and mods alike to keep the discussion respectful. This thread is not the place to debate opinions about torrents or boards or redesigns.

 

 

Part 1 - General Usage and Awareness

Fuwanovel 2014 Year PUBLIC Release - Part 1 General Usage and Awareness

 

 

 

Part 2 - Feedback

 

Homepage, Blog, Social Media, Chat

PUBLIC Fuwanovel 2014 Year Official Release - Part 2a Homepage 2b Blog Social Chat

 

Forums, Meta Discussion

Coming Soon

[Tay]

Just uploaded the first half of the feedback results. These discuss users' impressions of the:

1. Homepage
2. Blog
3. Social Media groups
4. FuwaChat

 

Note: the results feel a little lean because essay questions were withheld from the public release (see above). The last half of the feedback section will go up tomorrow.

 

Feel free to share thoughts and impressions in this thread!