Lea Remigio

It’s a good idea to survey your system end users from time to time. I’m admittedly not up to date on all the latest online survey tools, but Survey Monkey has always worked well for me. Survey Monkey is intuitive for responders and affordable for month-to-month service. I liked the conditional logic configuration option and the reporting tools to look at responses. But it’s worth researching other options. Maybe I’ll do that in a subsequent post. In the meantime, Idealware posted a comparison article for a few of the tools back in 2011.

Some survey methodology that worked for me:

1. If your user base spans organizations, send your survey link directly to the end users’ inboxes and not to the program directors or individual site administrators for distribution.

2. Inform the program directors in advance that you will be sending out the surveys and that you need them to encourage people to provide their feedback. After the survey is completed and the data has been compiled and analyzed, it’s always nice to share it with other stakeholders – with the participating organizations and with the software vendor. This is especially helpful for organizations that have either a very high or very low opinion of the information system. Give kudos to the directors whose user base is happy since that points to a supportive  and encouraging environment. Assist the directors whose user base is very dissatisfied with a plan to improve system usage (such as training).

3. Keep your response time short. Two weeks at the most. It’s a good idea to send a reminder email just two days before the deadline.

4. Allow anonymous responses, but if your user base spans organizations, require the organization affiliation on all responses.

5. Keep the time commitment for responding to under 15 or 20 minutes, or as brief as possible to still be meaningful.

6. Survey users every year or two. Keep the most important questions from one year to the next so that the satisfaction level can be compared to past surveys.

7. Weight your answers. When you set up the multiple choice questions, most survey tools will allow you to assign a numeric value to the answer. For example, if someone marks “Very Satisfied”, that value is a 5 on a scale from 1 to 5 where a higher score equates to a higher satisfaction level. This weighting is not visible to the survey responders, but makes aggregation and comparisons much easier for the survey administrator.

Here is a copy of the last user survey I worked with. We sent it out to over 1,200 users of the LegalServer case management system throughout the state of Florida and got about 215 responses, or about 17% response rate, which was disappointing, but not surprising. A 25% response rate is about as good as it gets, which is one good reason to send the survey link to as many people as possible. The Survey Monkey reporting tools helped us create some nice charts and graphs that we published in our final report. If you’d like to see the final report, send me an email and I’m happy to share it.