V-Base Development Blog

we’re currently undertaking some research with existing users of v-base, to find out how they would like to record details of policies and procedures against organisations and we’re doing this in the form of a mini-survey.

i’m always a bit apprehensive when sending out a survey – the voluntary sector is awash with surveys of all flavours and i know just how people feel when yet another email lands in your inbox, asking for your valuable input into something (hopefully) worthwhile.  seems like everyone’s consulting everyone else and there’s a risk of survey-itis, where people just start to ignore these emails in the hope that others will respond with opinions similar to their own.

it’s a dilemma. we don’t want to pester our users, but if we don’t find out what they want, what chance do we have of developing something they will find useful? or the end result not being tailored only to the needs of the small group of people who can always be relied on to contribute? i can’t see another way around this – all i can do is make our surveys as short and easy to respond to as possible in the hope that this presents less of a barrier.

i’ll write another post shortly about this particular piece of research. it’s related to functionality that already exists in v-base 2.x which we’re thinking of approaching differently in version 3. like a lot of our planned enhancements, the seed for this one originated with someone who actually uses v-base, rather than just being something our development team dreamt up. i think i have the original email somewhere – i’ll see if i can find it.