Chapter 8 The least you can do

I was inspired to write a chapter called “The least you can do”™ by Steve Krug, who includes the same trademarked phrase in his book Rocket Surgery Made Easy: The Do-It-Yourself Guide to Finding and Fixing Usability Problems. The ideas in this chapter will help you improve your survey when you are short of time or resources.

The topics in the chapter are:

  • The survey process has seven steps (a recap of the overall process from the book)
  • What to do when you’ve only got an hour (some ideas for quick things to improve a survey)
  • What to do when you’ve got a day (a timetable for a Light Touch Survey in a day)
  • What to do when you’ve got a whole week (a more generous timetable for a Light Touch Survey when you can spare a whole week)
  • The checklist for everything (checklists that align with the seven chapters / seven steps in the survey process)

And I wrap up the book with my final word: “iterate”, urging you to keep working on your surveys.

Here are downloadable versions of the timetables and checklists in this chapter:

Here is the survey process as an image.

The seven steps of the survey process are: Goals: Establish your goals for the survey, leading to questions you need answers to Sample: Check who to ask and how many, leading to people you will invite to answer Questions: Test the questions, leading to questions people can answer Questionnaire: Build the questionnaire, leading to questions people can interact with Fieldwork: Run the survey from invitation to follow-up, leading to people who respond Responses: Clean and analyze the data, leading to answers Reports: Present the results, leading to decisions.
The survey process in seven steps