Question: Have you used surveys to inform open hardware development?

kgradow1 is asking a question about air-quality
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by kgradow1 | April 30, 2020 15:39 | #23522


Hi everyone! My name is Katie. I'm a Community Tech Fellow working on updated documentation for the bucket samplers with Public Lab and Fair Tech Collective. I'd like to explore putting together a simple survey for prospective users -- people who may not be familiar with the bucket grab sampling, but who may be interested in using the bucket for air quality monitoring -- to inform kit documentation.

What I'm looking for, at this point, is best practices on community survey design, as well as any thoughts or reflections on what's worked well in conducting polls or surveys to help inform design decisions about environmental tools in your community. Have you done this, and has it felt like a good use of time? Do you have resources you'd be willing to share? What's worked? What pitfalls have you encountered?

For more info about the project, see https://publiclab.org/wiki/air-sampling

PL notes on community evaluation: https://publiclab.org/evaluation



1 Comments

Hi @Katie, i believe we have done something related, but not exactly what you are inquiring about. We have used video interviews to learn how people search for / navigate to environmental information on publiclab.org. We did user research to understand what our information architecture was lacking (hint - a lot ;).

Most of our tool design and tool documentation was directed by in-person requests, tests, and feedback.

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