Effective Questionnaires

How do we make an effective and helpful questionnaire?

• Semantic Scales
• Keep it simple enough to be understandable
• "Other"
• "If yes/no, why"
• Ask about what you want to know
• Ask precise questions, not vague ones
• Limit the amount of responses
• "if never, would you?"

In class we looked at a questionnaire on the music industry. We looked at the magazine and had to work out how to improve certain questions and add/remove aspects we thought did not help research the audience. The questionnaire was focusing on researching for creating an app and video for a made up artist. This was quite specific so taking out some of the pointless questions was easy.

 One of these questions were: " Do you own a smartphone? If so what brand?" This question doesn't have any real relevance to the audience. All it gives us is the phone that they use, what we want is which app/music platform they use so that our app can be targeted to work well with that device.

We also looked at the first questions which where "How old are you?" and "Are you Male or Female?" these are very crucial questions as without them you do not know who is giving you the rest of the information in the questionnaire. If you do find out the age and gender of the participant you can then tell what your target audience answered.

Homework Mr Maddocks due Thursday 26th

Questionnaires can inform a company or designer on many aspects of their target audience and things that can improve their work. Firstly they ask the participants age and gender, this helps the company interpret the answers in the rest of the questionnaire. For example, if a magazines producers target audience is 16-25 year old males then they will not be overly interested in questionnaires answered with different ages and genders. For example 50+ females.  With this information they can use other answerers to improve their work. This can be multiple choice answers such as "How many music magazines do you buy a week?" or scale answers such as "On a scale of 1-10, how much do you enjoy indie-rock music compared to other genres". All of this type of information from questionnaires will come in handy when creating a magazine focused at a specific target audience.

Some topics that I could be:

• Age
• Gender
• Preferred Genre
• Preferred Bands
• Opinions on magazines
• Preferred magazines
• How often they read/buy music magazines
• Preferred Music streaming/listening service
• How do they download music
• Do you use music apps
• Do you use social media
• Preferred Radio station
• Preferred music TV channel
• Live music
• Festivals
• Brands of clothes and footwear (for advertising)
• Makes of cars (for advertising)
• Drinks (advertising)
• Font
• Language