Assignment 3 - ISU570 Human Computer Interaction - Spring 2009

"Designing and conducting an online survey"

Results due by email and/or as hardcopy
at the beginning of class Tuesday, March 10th

Professor Futrelle, CCIS, Northeastern University

Version of January 4, 2009


The basics of Assignment 3

This assignment will allow you to explore online surveys. Your task will be to choose a free online survey design site, design your survey, alert a number of people to it, and collect and analyze your results. You should read Chapter 12 of your book carefully, Introducing Evaluation. It will also be helpful to read Chapter 15, Analytical Evaluation. As usual, you should refer to concepts in your book in your discussion of the design and analysis of your survey. Students in past offerings of this course often chose Survey Monkey for this kind of evaluation.

Organizing your work - start early!

This assignment is one that cannot possibly be done the night before. You should begin working on it no later than two weeks in advance, say Tuesday, February 17th.

What to survey for

You should choose some particular system that your respondents will be familiar with and build your survey to learn about what they like and dislike about the system. There are a wide variety of possible systems from word processors, to swipe card systems, to automobile dashboards/controls. The textbook, as well as the many topics discussed in the Projects page and in the collection of abstracts could help you in choosing a topic.

Who to survey

Most of the people in the world are not college students (!) So you should do your best to include people in your survey of a variety of ages. This is not as difficult as it sounds, since you can ask your parents and other relatives to take the survey and to tell their friends about it. This means that you will need to devote one of you questions to finding out the age of the respondents. In that question you can give a choice of age ranges such as 5-12, 13-17, 18-25, 26-39, 40-65, 66 and above.


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