Author: James He (@hesatprylabs)

The following documentation will be used to track lessons learned and techniques to better survey development in the future.

note - I am not a data scientist, I am not a statistician, and I did not get formal training on creating surveys; feel free to contact me for feedback and suggestions

Survey(s)

Ethereum Staker Onboarding Experience Survey

Survey Creation

• use Google forms or survey monkey

• follow some guidelines https://www.surveymonkey.com/mp/survey-guidelines/

• Understand the type of form controls, when to use radio buttons vs check boxes vs drop downs etc...

• Have a consistent number range for all your items ( i.e. 1-10 or 1-5)

• It's important to add a disclaimer

  • disclaimers can provide background and help frame the survey. Describing things like what is being surveyed, who are the people being surveyed, what will happen with the results, will the results be published, who will the results be shared with, and what it would mean to participate in the survey.
  • preface with any bias in the interpretation of the results
  • the survey is anonymous and there fore can be subject to misinformation

• Avoid answers that overlap.

  • avoid questions like this

    ![<https://i.imgur.com/RSkLPHa.png>](<https://i.imgur.com/RSkLPHa.png>)
  

  • month 3 could represent in 2 answers

• make sure you know your measurements! research the notations for clearer questions

  • i.e. gb is ambiguous between "GB" and "GiB" (hard drive storage question)

• Keep the survey no longer than 10 minutes, mostly multiple choice, less than 20 questions ideally; short and to the point.

• make sure you have the right multiple choice answers when you give the "other option"!

  • otherwise you'll end up with something like this

    

  • NUC was by far the most popular choice but i didn't include it, the result was different spellings of the same thing.

Survey Distribution

• COORDINATION! my biggest lesson learned from this experience is that one of our most valuable resources is community participation, and if everyone starts creating surveys there might be less participation when it's needed. Butta and I rushed the release of the survey without realizing that there was going to be a very similar survey published by the Ethereum foundation.
• coordinate with appropriate channels to distribute the survey to the target audience without too much duplication
• have some vagueness to give yourself a buffer room releasing data, there might be more things to consider before publishing.
• please look forward to another survey coming from the Ethereum Foundation Research group soon.