Doodle on this..

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Ever wanted to doodle in a blog post? Here's your chance!


What time is it? You might be curious as to how little time this took, later. => 


Recently used "wibe" style questionnaires for a project recently which worked pretty well. People seemed to have fun filling out plain text boxes with a 0-9 followed by a comment. It can be lightning fast but it also allows for open ended answers. People also got started quickly, if you'd believe that. The data was i interesting and somewhat useful.


 We did had a laugh when two submitters answered 4 and 7 to the following question:


Do you live in a rural place?  
How rural? Eg. "1, i live in Manhattan, it's big" or "9 I live in the middle of a forest, located in the middle of nowhere."


A five you might surmise means your average suburb. 
And yes, they live next door to each other.


Now you might argue this is a perfect illustration that 
a) questionnaires are stupid and useless because 
b) rating scales are stupid and useless.


If i wanted to have the answer to that question I'd consider checking their physical location, check the population density, or just do both with some mashup of the IP and some database. Right?  


However, did we learn anything here, and if so what?  Did they answer anything useful?  Could this be improved?


Regardless of the size of the city they live in one believes it's somewhat of a city and the other thinks it's a textbook little berg. Who's right? Both I'd say. But what i found the most interesting is the mindset.


I'm sure bias can be somewhat reduced by better questions and examples. Or use sanctioned formats and scales. And if one thought survey answers are quantitative things one might be moved to do that. But that's another story. The difference between the answer and the expected answer is interesting.  


Love your thoughts. (these boxes are pretty anonymous)

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