So far the answers to question 12 in the Signal vs. Noise survey have formed a perfect bell. Amazing.
You’re reading Signal v. Noise, a publication about the web by Basecamp since 1999. Happy !
So far the answers to question 12 in the Signal vs. Noise survey have formed a perfect bell. Amazing.
Radical Dreamer
on 18 Dec 08Aren’t you skewing the results of an ongoing survey by publishing the results?
Jeff
on 18 Dec 08Wow, not much action you guys could take based on results like that.
Vincent
on 18 Dec 08That’s one of the issues that leads survey experts to remove the neutral choice. Too many people tend to use the neutral answer as a way to end the survey faster.
By not providing a neutral answer, you will actually force people to think. Not anyone may like it so you may have less answers but they will be more valuable.
Chris
on 18 Dec 08Why the survey in the first place? I thought SvN was an outlet for 37 Signals. Should your readers really control what you write about?
JF
on 18 Dec 08Chris: A survey doesn’t control what we write about. We’re simply curious about the questions we’re asking. That’s why we’re conducting the survey.
Jordi
on 18 Dec 08Well, Vincent, actually in this survey we can see that the result is the neutral answer… If it weren’t a neutral answer, the answer would be neutral too… by splitting those votes into half pos/neg votes…
Curious George
on 18 Dec 08I’m interested in the results of the “jump the shark” question.
Since the answer choices are a binary “yes” or “no”.
GeeIWonder
on 18 Dec 08If it weren’t a neutral answer, the answer would be neutral too… by splitting those votes into half pos/neg votes…
This does not follow.
jamesckim
on 18 Dec 08There is an implicit sixth option. The blog has gotten so bad that I unsubscribed my rss and didn’t even see the survey.
I actually really like this blog so that’s not me. :-)
David Andersen
on 18 Dec 08Bad assumption Jordi.
PSols
on 18 Dec 08I was always taught to provide an even number of choices for each question in a survey.
Peter Cooper
on 19 Dec 08Too many people tend to use the neutral answer as a way to end the survey faster.
If you really wanted to end the survey faster, you’d just click an item at random (a bit like how on Hot Or Not nearly all votes were a 10 or 1 – people just wanna look at the pictures). I’ve done that before, so I’m glad of a neutral option if that’s what my actual opinion is.
SS
on 19 Dec 08All the questions on the survey are optional.
Terry Sutton
on 19 Dec 08what’s really interesting is that almost 300 people cared enough about svn (at that early point) to fill out a survey.
Chris Hajer
on 20 Dec 08I forget if there was a question asking when we started reading svn, so you could correlate the time period that people are referring to in “over time.”
Brian Jones
on 21 Dec 08You’ll have to find some way to make the blog better!
This discussion is closed.