The Goal of Survey:
We have decided to establish the survey as a gathering tool mainly to know more from our potential users, what they expect to see in the application and whether this application would be useful for them or not. In other words, is MeetingOfMinds something users really want. We believe that this way will help us in building a successful application. In addition, this survey aims to assess the importance of the issue which we are going to solve it in the MeetingOfMinds. Therefore, it highlights the aspects that we have to focus on them more and the areas of design that we need to take care about it to deliver what users really want.
We built our survey using Google Forms, and separated the it into four sections:
1- In the first section we have asked some questions to know how frequently users use the social networks, which platform they preferred more
2- The second section has some questions about Academic Social Network to know whether users are familiar with those networks or not and what are the services users need to be available in such networks.
3- In the third and fourth sections, we have focused to know more from postgraduate students’ experience in term of finding a supervisor for their thesis. Also, to know what features they expect to find from application like MeetingOfMinds.
Please view our survey from this link: MeetingOfMinds Survey
Potential Users:
Our target audience as mentioned previously in the Welcome to the ‘MeetingofMinds’ Project post which illustrated that our platform on this stage is dedicated for University of Southampton’s students and staff. Thus, while we were designing our survey we had focused to target this audience. As University members ourselves this should be easy to collect through email, and through other social media platforms.
Ethical approval:
In order to be able to distribute our survey, we needed to apply for ERGO which is the University of Southampton system that checks about Ethics and Research Governance to make sure they complies with University policy. The ERGO process asked to complete some documents – by using the FPSE instructions and guidelines. Templates for each one of these documents were found through the ERGO site. We followed all instructions and guidelines and we submitted our ERGO application which included all documents required which are: The Survey, Ethics form, Application form, Participant form, Consent information and Risk Assessment. But, because our submission was in the period of Easter break as well as there was the strike that affected on the process, thus, the replied from the ethics team was very late to be able to distribute the survey and analyse the results.