Crunchberry Project

Image source: Summer Luu/flickr

In our quest to learn more about the needs and interests of the people living in Cedar Rapids we developed an online survey.  The advantage of using that method was that we could reach a larger pool of people in a short amount of time.  The disadvantage was that we couldn’t really ask many opened-ended questions or follow-up on interesting answers.  To address this, we called a subset of the people who took our online survey and asked them some of the following questions

• What sorts of things do you do for fun?
• What do you do on a weekday evening?
• What do you do on a typical weekend?
• What area do you live in and why did you choose to live there?
• What do you like about your area?
• What don’t you like about it?
• What would make eastern Iowa a better place to live?
• Where do you get your news?
• Do you feel that the news sources you use satisfy your needs?
• What issues are important to you?
• What web sites do you use frequently?
• Do you use any web sites to find information about Cedar Rapids or eastern Iowa?
• Do you discuss news on the Internet, over chat, commenting on stories, or in online forums?

It turned out to be quite useful and allowed us to get a better sense of what the people we spoke with were like.  We may end up using this information to develop user personas, a collection of the interests and behaviors of a real group of potential users of our product. The personas will be created using data we collected from our interviews and surveys and will help give a human face to the people we are developing for.  Follow this link for more on the origin of personas.