We invite you to share your perspective and help us improve the Second Life experience!

[BelindaN]

I wouldn't complete that survey anyway as I'm survey averse.

But where's the "prefer not to say" box?

I almost signed up as a club dancer a long while ago, but one question, my real life age, was totally inappropriate. Maybe "are you over 18" or whatever, but my bio age is nobody's business.

And dont get me started on surveys with text boxes.

[LilNosferatu]

17 minutes ago, Syo Emerald said:

@LilNosferatu Well, its still a terrible example of a ethicity question in a survey. Its incomplete and given the topic insensitive, if you adress an international audience.

Like I said, everyone's totally free to their opinions on the questions. My point was only that these aren't out of left field and pretty much every consumer survey ever asks these same ones, copy-pasted. Like Ayashe, I also used to get paid to complete surveys to have money through high school or in between college jobs so I've done everything from psychological studies to "whats your first impression of this new prototype product" type of thing. Even if it was a survey called "how much do you like balloons" it would still want to know ethnicity/race, income levels, highest level of education, etc. 🤷‍♀️ They might seem completely irrelevant, offensive, goofy, etc but that's just how surveys are.

[Theresa Tennyson]

At least now we know where all the grad students who make posts to try to get us to take badly-designed research questionnaires go where they graduate...

[Syo Emerald]

22 minutes ago, LilNosferatu said:

Like I said, everyone's totally free to their opinions on the questions. My point was only that these aren't out of left field and pretty much every consumer survey ever asks these same ones, copy-pasted. Like Ayashe, I also used to get paid to complete surveys to have money through high school or in between college jobs so I've done everything from psychological studies to "whats your first impression of this new prototype product" type of thing. Even if it was a survey called "how much do you like balloons" it would still want to know ethnicity/race, income levels, highest level of education, etc. 🤷‍♀️ They might seem completely irrelevant, offensive, goofy, etc but that's just how surveys are.

I'm not argueing that these questions are often part of surveys, but your post (and those of your two supporters) had the ring to it, as if it should generally go unquestioned and uncriticised. And I do have my fair share of survey experiance as well (also on the constructing side of it). I've only seen what people shared here and can't judge the survey in its entirety, but if the other demographic questions have the same quality... oh boy.

[Rowan Amore]

I'll just lie about the irrelevant questions.  

[Kimmi Zehetbauer]

Looks like something the new owners of Linden Lab pushed through.

[Sid Nagy]

My approach to every business survey request gets a very clear and personalized touch.
I push on delete without any hesitation and no exceptions.
They have me as a customer that should be sufficient for them to know.
 

Edited January 11, 2022 by Sid Nagy

[Scylla Rhiadra]

The irony here is that there is stuff that we all wish we could tell LL about how to improve the platform -- and none of this is it.

Marketing is so weird. Rather than simply ask us, "Do you want more games on the platform?" they want to slot us into demographics that they think will indirectly tell them the same information.

Because their analytics, they're pretty sure, know us better than we know ourselves.

[Silent Mistwalker]

We are not Native Americans. We are First Nations. 

It still won't change the US industry standard questions for surveys like this.

[Kimmi Zehetbauer]

4 minutes ago, Silent Mistwalker said:

We are not Native Americans. We are First Nations. 

It still won't change the US industry standard questions for surveys like this.

My daughter is married to a First Nation gentleman and that stuff irritates him to no end.  It's as bad as the "African-American" word, who was coined by a white person.

[Anna Nova]

In the UK we used to have a Census questionnaire every 10 years (so I only got to do one, but I read a lot 'cos Statistics was part of my degree).  It used to have an ethnicity question that basically listed the nations of the UK.  But then immigration started, and so they added the skin melamine questions too, but at least it always had a 'Prefer not to answer' tick-box!  Of course, being a misgovernment census, you were obliged by law to fill it in.  Now the misgovernment believes it knows all that stuff from some other source, and said the last census was the last census - which scares me more than filling in the form - but at least we are still a democracy right?

Yeah.

[Paul Hexem]

Really? This is what we're getting offended over now? Some idiotic survey generated by an analytics computer? I doubt real humans even typed it all out. I know no real humans are actually going to read it.

[colleen Criss]

3 hours ago, BelindaN said:

I wouldn't complete that survey anyway as I'm survey averse.

But where's the "prefer not to say" box?

I almost signed up as a club dancer a long while ago, but one question, my real life age, was totally inappropriate. Maybe "are you over 18" or whatever, but my bio age is nobody's business.

And dont get me started on surveys with text boxes.

Whenever any avatar / SL questionnaire  asks me my age , I give them the exact date my avatar rez'd in world. *shrugs*

[Arduenn Schwartzman]

It would have been less ambiguous and more objective it they'd just ask for a cheek swab to determine our mtDNA haplotypes.

But all jokes aside, my guess is that in the survey it's not so much about the genetics, but more about trying to discover correlations between someone's cultural background (presumably tightly linked to 'race') in relation to their preferences in the SL world. They could have phrased that in a different way, though. Something in the line of: 'Which geographically-associated culture do you have the highest affinity? (European, Middle-Eastern, etc.)

[Profaitchikenz Haiku]

I may be odd, slightly eccentric,or just plan cantankerous today, but as I see it those are useful question to try and determine who is most likely to be an SL user. It leads to the interesting thought of: for those categories who aren't, what can be done to make it more appealing to them?

Somebody somewhere is going to be enraged that in any section on religion there isn't a box to check for Klingon.

Edited January 11, 2022 by Profaitchikenz Haiku

[Mollymews]

i think every survey should have a final question

"How would you rate the number of lies you told in this survey?  Mostly Lies | All Lies | Totally All Lies"

😸

[bigmoe Whitfield]

5 hours ago, Silent Mistwalker said:

We are not Native Americans. We are First Nations. 

It still won't change the US industry standard questions for surveys like this.

my native friends out here in utah would like to have a word with you about using that first nations term,  they are not accepting it.

[Max Nova]

The last time I did a survey posted on the forums (thinking it was legitimate) I became pen pals with a Nigerian prince! 

[LilNosferatu]

Just now, Max Nova said:

The last time I did a survey posted on the forums (thinking it was legitimate) I became pen pals with a Nigerian prince! 

That's awesome! I hear they'll send you thousands of dollars if you lend them your bank account, social security, routing number, date of birth, and credit card information -- so generous!

[Stephanie Misfit]

13 hours ago, Leahndra said:

Did they forgot Europeans on purpose?

And Australians, and the whole rest of the world. I'd be stopping the survey when I got to that part about background, thinking that it must be targeted at an exclusively US user base. And maybe that's all they are interested in.

[animats]

It's superficial, which is about what you'd expect.

It's not like playtesting from game development, which is more useful.

If LL really wants to fix the onboarding experience, here's the usual user experience testing approach:

• Pay non-users to participate in a 2-3 hour study that pays about $100. Usually this is done in some place like a mall, but during COVID it probably has to be remote.
• They get a task list. Log in, create an avatar, and do a few things - talk to someone, visit a club, look at a house, visit a museum, play a game, ride in a boat... Give a list of maybe 10 tasks. Do any 5 and you're done.
• Record video of both screen and user during this.
• Have the video logged. Typical job for psych students. Logging focuses on where the user got stuck, failed, had to back up, had to ask for help, showed annoyance or anger, or encountered a bug.
• Make a highlights reel of every place where more than one user had trouble.
• Show highlights reel to everybody involved in product.

There are commercial companies which can assist with this.

The trouble is, it definitively establishes where the product sucks. Many companies can't handle the truth.

[Silent Mistwalker]

1 hour ago, bigmoe Whitfield said:

my native friends out here in utah would like to have a word with you about using that first nations term,  they are not accepting it.

I'd tell you to ask them if they are apples or blankets but that would probably piss them off even more. Oh well. 

It may be that their nation(s) never occupied both sides of the present day Canadian-US border. Ours did. 

The vast majority of us consider ourselves <insert tribe here> before considering ourselves to be American, if we even consider ourselves to be American. Depends on who you talk to and how assimilated they are. 

[Scylla Rhiadra]

1 minute ago, Silent Mistwalker said:

I'd tell you to ask them if they are apples or blankets but that would probably piss them off even more. Oh well. 

It may be that their nation(s) never occupied both sides of the present day Canadian-US border. Ours did. 

The vast majority of us consider ourselves <insert tribe here> before considering ourselves to be American, if we even consider ourselves to be American. Depends on who you talk to and how assimilated they are. 

Here in Canada it's pretty much exclusively First Nations.

And nearly everyone does a land acknowledgement, recognizing the particular nation whose land we are occupying, before starting events. I do, before every class I teach.

[Silent Mistwalker]

54 minutes ago, animats said:

It's superficial, which is about what you'd expect.

It's not like playtesting from game development, which is more useful.

If LL really wants to fix the onboarding experience, here's the usual user experience testing approach:

• Pay non-users to participate in a 2-3 hour study that pays about $100. Usually this is done in some place like a mall, but during COVID it probably has to be remote.
• They get a task list. Log in, create an avatar, and do a few things - talk to someone, visit a club, look at a house, visit a museum, play a game, ride in a boat... Give a list of maybe 10 tasks. Do any 5 and you're done.
• Record video of both screen and user during this.
• Have the video logged. Typical job for psych students. Logging focuses on where the user got stuck, failed, had to back up, had to ask for help, showed annoyance or anger, or encountered a bug.
• Make a highlights reel of every place where more than one user had trouble.
• Show highlights reel to everybody involved in product.

There are commercial companies which can assist with this.

The trouble is, it definitively establishes where the product sucks. Many companies can't handle the truth.

 

Lots of companies out there do this. I worked for one such research firm about 10 years ago. I didn't much like cold calling and being cussed at for disturbing people's dinners etc.

It would cost LL a lot less to hire one of those companies than to do it themselves.

[Silent Mistwalker]

1 minute ago, Scylla Rhiadra said:

Here in Canada it's pretty much exclusively First Nations.

And nearly everyone does a land acknowledgement, recognizing the particular nation whose land we are occupying, before starting events. I do, before every class I teach.

Yep. The Canucks were using the term long before the US even heard of it.