E-Media Tidbits

weather.gov Site feedback surveys have some common and unfortunate blind spots.

In the past few weeks I have been pretty generous about filling out online surveys requesting feedback about Web sites. Mostly I click those requests away, but since I will we conducting my own surveys soon I thought completing some of them would be a good learning experience.

To be honest, in most cases this was a pretty annoying experience.

It was obvious that the survey makers failed to put themselves in the shoes of people who are kind enough to fill in their questionnaires. More than half the time I was lost and did not finish the survey.

Most of these surveys assume that I have a thorough understanding and well-founded opinion of the sites I visit. They simply omit the "I have no clue" option when soliciting feedback. I don't mind offering my expert opinion -- but as a simple user, I mostly do not get that far with analyzing Web sites.

Even worse, site feedback surveys uniformly ignore my habit of finding Web content through RSS feeds and search engines. They all want to know how often I "visit" their site: a rather outdated view of Internet users' habits. In fact, I mostly do not visit their sites at all. Rather, I find their content in my feed reader, or in my search engine filters, or when it's referred to my by one of my trusted human sources.

I'm probably part of the digital vanguard who can effectively disconnect information from its original venue. But even if I belong to a small minority, I hate being ignored by these surveys.