[ODE] <Survey>: ODE - Present and Direction.

[gl]

> Question 1: The middle ranges are too qualitative; While "perfect" and
> useless are clear indicators of how someone feels about ode, the middle
> ranges are ambiguous and meaningless.. for example,  how do you quantify
the
> difference between "needs some work" and "needs plentyof work"?
> suggestions for improvement:

I disagree - the differentiation is clear to me.  Looking at the results, it
also seems clear to the participants.  'Needs some work' means it's mostly
living up to expectation, 'needs plenty of work' means it isn't.

> Add a short answer section that allows people to comment on why and how
ode
> is good/bad. While this does not allow you to tally results in a nice
> looking progress bar % meter, it lets people generate meaningful, tangible
> feedback that can be quantified. (eg  "Needs Some work, capped cylinder
> supoort is blah blah blah [insert comment here]")

Sure - if you're willing to read through all the replies manually, and write
up a summary : ) - I'm not.

> Question 2:  This is probably ok, but I might add a section allowing
people
> to specify which specific platform they are using for the last option.

See above  : ).  Seriously, text input would be useful is someone were
willing to study it all.  But then we might aswell pose questions on the
mailing list, and study all the answers.  The whole point was to cut through
the long-winded answers, and often resulting discussions, and just quickly
find out what the deal is in general.  If that then generates discussion, at
least we have some basics out of the way.

> Question 3: The wording here is misleading..."Where does ODE failthe
most?"
> implies that a single answer response is expected. Limit this to allowing
> only 1 entry to be chosen.

Sure, but then you only get a single failure.  I could have done the 'top 3
failures' thing, but I wanted to keep it short.  Again the answers seem
pretty clear to me.

> As with question 1, allowing people to provide information describing WHY
> that particular item fails the most is important because it allows people
to
> quantify and explain their choice.

Above.

> Question 4: This question should be eliminated, it is redundant w.r.t.
> questions 5-7

Kinda true, but I wanted an easy way to see if certain things weren't of
interest at all, no matter what the priority.

> Question 5: Change the wording to "which future development is top
priority > for you?"
> Questions 6,7: See q5

I don't think anybody got confused.

> Question 8: Split this up into 2 questions; q8 contains list of existing
> primitives that are important, q9 includes list of future primitives that
> are important (be sure to provide a brief explanation of future primitives
> so more people will know what they are selecting)

Why the seperation?  The questions is basically saying 'in an ideal world,
what primtives would you use?'  Whether they exist or not isn't the point.

Re. description, the text limit is pretty harsh - I actually had to cut a
few lines down.

> Question 9:(will be question 10) this is fine, although I dont see this
> providing much insight into anything...

It shows that plenty of people would like to see 'beyond rigid-body core'
features.  Again, it's just an overview - there's plenty of scope for
getting into detail in future surveys or on the list.  Hey, I wasn't even
sure anybody would bother filling this one out : ).

> This may seem like nitpicking, but I assure you it's not. Carefully
> developing a survey is critical because otherwise you accumulate feedback
on
> an issue, attempt to satisfy the needs derived from the survey results,
and
> that in turn inevitably leads to converging on the wrong solution(s).
> If the survey system you are using does not allow for these types of
survey
> collection controls,I would argue that we should go with a another survey
> system that does allow information to be collected in this fashion. (There
> are dozens of free systems to choose from, or we could write one...we are
> talking about to mysql tables and a handfullof php scripts)

Look, if you want to design an exhaustive survey, carefully tuned (and I
agree you can tune this very carefully), then please do.  What I wanted to
do is make a very quick, easy to use, survey that (often busy) people would
actually fill out, covering some of the basics - keeping it simple was
deliberate.
--
gl