Moving Forward from Last Week
Last week I wrote about the struggle of putting together a survey and receiving limited response while I was at CCCC. This resulted in a bit of stress as we moved toward the final weeks of the semester, and I most notably realized that having an alternative plan in place to jump over that hurdle was necessary – and may still be a component of the final report for my project. However, through the grace of the chair of the Literacy Studies Interest Group at CCCC, my survey was sent out to a larger listserv garnering more attention from graduate students and researchers are various institutions. This increased my respondents to 7, with most indicating an interest in a follow up within the next week. With 7 responses, I should be able to make a more focused determination on stakeholder needs when I bring the data over to the report at the end of the semester.
What to Do With the Survey Data
The surveys have indicated a clear need for certain planned enhancements to the sites, such as the need for more consistent keyword identification, enhanced search and sorting functionality, potential need for a glossary and working bibliography of recent research, and surprisingly a lack of interest in collections of curated materials. This data is somewhat surprising, as when I engage in archival research having curated collections tends to enhance my research process, but the same effects could be achieved with more consistent keywords across existing narratives. Through upcoming interviews, this will be a key area of interest as I talk to respondents about their needs. Beyond that, more consistent responses indicate personas for future user experience research too. Respondents all indicated that they are either pursuing a Ph.D. or already have one; our audience is potentially made up of highly educated researchers far more than professional stakeholders, or as a result of networking the potential list of respondents grew to disproportionately represent researchers and grad student stakeholders. As such, it will be pertinent for future user experience research to refocus on professional stakeholders as we move forward, but this should be enough information to make decisions about what we focus on as we pursue the NEH’s DHA grant.
The Importance of Networking
Getting to this point would have been impossible if not for networking. Talking to people who have a vested interest in the project’s success are vital to ongoing user research, and finding places where such stakeholders congregate may be a component of my user experience methods moving forward. By positioning myself around my stakeholders, by talking to them about upcoming plans to enhance the websites the DALN is hosted on, by demonstrating my own passion for the project, it is likely that such stakeholders were influenced to both take the survey, and disburse the survey to a wider audience. Thus, I will be prioritizing networking in the future for user experience research in future projects, as it seems to be the most effective way of both adopting the ethos of those close to my stakeholder population, as well as reducing the need to send out individual survey links to people I’ve never talked to before. With the ongoing increase in cybersecurity related issues facing universities, clicking on a suspicious link in a random email from a grad student you’ve never heard of may be too much of an ask for most people and there can be no expectation that they take the time to search up “Dylan Maroney GSU” to see if I actually exist. Therefore, I can’t overstate how vital networking has been and will be moving forward.