[ubuntu-uk] Ubuntu User experience survey

[Paul Tansom]

** Alan Bell <alanbell at ubuntu.com> [2011-05-25 12:24]:
> On 25/05/11 12:14, Paul Tansom wrote:
> >** Avi Greenbury<lists at avi.co>  [2011-05-25 09:05]:
> >>It's a bit weird that I can pick several different versions of
> >>Ubuntu (Unity, Gnome, KDE, XFCE etc.) but only one install medium...
> >** end quote [Avi Greenbury]
> >
> >Yes, I ran up against the problem of which type of install to choose. I can pick from:
> >
> >o as the only OS, from a live CD or USB
> >o alongside another OS, from a live CD or USB
> >o as the only OS, from a text installer
> >
> >as I use all 3, likely about equally. You also don't have 'preinstalled' on
> >there, which may not be commong, but my VPS was preinstalled with Ubuntu LTS :)
> >When I get round to reinstalling it I think it will likely be installed from an
> >image, but that may be taking things too far!!
> >
> I asked maco for the preinstalled option, maybe that question should
> be checkboxes rather than radio buttons. In all surveys there are
> edge cases where some questions are hard to answer for some people,
> and fixing that would make the survey over complicated so that other
> people find it hard, or the results are not compilable into useful
> statistics.
** end quote [Alan Bell]

Indeed, getting useful data out of surveys as opposed to simply creating survey
data to support a pre determined conclusion (see details on just about any
survey quoted on an advert!) is a nightmare. Lies, damn lies and statistice!!
Too much flexibility in the options and you can't make any sensible
conclusions, too little and those conclusions have been influenced :)

Perhaps some means of entering multiple surveys would help (although that
creates the issue of people trying to influence the result artificially). For
example, I tend to dual boot my desktops, but netbooks will be purely Linux,
and servers will be purely Linux from the text installer - so in my case these
are very distinct instances that would likely impact the next set of questions
depending on machine purpose. Of course some will have a variety of cases for a
desktop, but adding in machine type and allowing a set of entries for each type
may help, possibly, perhaps ;)

-- 
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