As pointed out in post #2, my first topic to work on is to continue the requirements analysis for limesurvey by gathering empirical data.

This data is supposed to support the design for LimeSurvey as it helps to:

1. set priorities in the development process: f.e. to give answer to the question who needs which features?
2. validate the work with personas done so far: are assumptions made within personas accurate?
3. gather new information: in particular to work further on usage scenarios (f.e. to answer the question which scenarios are the most likely ones?)

Besides, here is a very nice video from Marissa Mayer, responsible for User experience at Google, a talk at Stanford including a few great statements on why you need user’s feedback.

... but let’s get started …

To investigate the listed topics, I constructed a feedback survey for the users of limesurvey.
Additionally, questions that arouse during my previous work on personas are taken into account.

Last weekend I spontanesouly joined the barcamp hannover to offer a session about my first steps in OpenSource usability with LimeSurvey. It was an inspiring talk discussion after all, including a nice chat with Ludwig Gatzke, a guy I had already noticed at last years MuC.

I have included the few slides from the session here.

The key messages (besides all the stuff that is already mentioned in ealier posts on this blog) of the talk were the following:

I am talking about opensource usability, because I think that innovation requires communication. If you have a good idea (e.g. to start a start-up), be sure that a bunch of people around your community (and somewhere else) have the same idea at the same time.

Why is that? – Because, loosely speaking, communication generates ideas.
(Even if women may think while speaking, while men do so before and/or after verbalization ;).)

Which project to join

Find a Project that …

Today Yesterday, I started using the valuable information from brian about his interviews with users of limesurvey to build personas as a next (the first for me ;) ) step in the requirements analysis of LS2.0. He worked out a summary of user types for LS2.0 that I’m happy to use as a starting point now.

I’m trying to recall a method again that I first used at virtuos when working on virtPresenter – it was developed by Carroll and is called Scenario-Based Design (SBD).

Although, I think it is not reasonable for LS to build all requirements work on scenarios. From my point of view it totally makes sense to use a combination of personas + scenarios especially in early stages of development and when working with distributed teams in particular.

Carroll’s Top 5 reason’s for SBD.

As mentioned in my last post, brian asked me to take over the user research for LimeSurvey 2.0.

A few forum posts later I found that there was already a feedback-survey for LimeSurvey2.0 .
After Carsten Schmitz (Project Lead of LimeSurvey) granted me access to the results, it was only a matter of minutes until the whole pile of data was on my machine, ready for some number-crunching.

Amazing 9500+ responses had been collected. With my favorite statistics tool R I went to work.
As expected, the questionnaire was aiming for the technical aspects of LimeSurvey (i.e. what version of LS a user has in use) and therefore less suited for requirements gathering purposes (additionally psychological experience was missing in the test construction ;) ), but as a starting point it was so much more than I had expected.
(Honestly, do you expect the average OS-project to collect user feedback?)

I have summarized the results in the wiki again.

As you can see looking at the analysis, most options are just too brought to show any difference (i.e. What do people use LimeSurvey for?), others nevertheless provide valuable insights. For example LS is used for commercial, public as well as private projects.

In this first two weeks working on LimeSurvey, I was quite too busy to post about it, so I catch up on everything now.

After a short phone call with Juhan we agreed that it would be a good starting point for me to bring my hands on experience with LimeSurvey into the team. (A complete expert review of the old version would be pointless as version 2.0 is build up from scratch.)

I have just recently used LimeSurvey for a 1000+ participants survey at usability.de (see last post here) and some smaller questionnaires – enough to consider myself as power-user.

Although, I’m only one of the many people using LimeSurvey (looking forward to the requirements analysis section ;) ), I hope my input will be valuable to the project and may help me to get more involved with the project.

Therefore, I started by summarizing the most important positive aspects of LimeSurvey in the project wiki .

In case you are a LimeSurvey user, please don’t hesitate to add your wishlist and comments there!

While working on this task I already got the first job-request – in one phrase it could be stated as do some user research to facilitate the development of personas for LimeSurvey 2.0 .

This will be the topic of the next post …