Learning how to use Survey Monkey

To gather my audience research and to get a wide and accurate representation of my target audience to be able to produce a valuable product design that would appeal and achieve its purpose I used the online site SurveyMonkey. I had never used SurveyMonkey before so I have gathered and developed skills that before I had never acquired before.

I first had to decide the name of my music magazine and decide the category of my survey. As my survey is for my music magazine I have put it under the category of 'Market Research', I decided against placing it under 'Education' as it may affect my results if people know that it isn't for a real product free for the public to use. I called it 'Music Magazine Survey' because it is straight forward and might appeal people to answer it as it conveys as a very simplistic survey which would be completed quickly. 

I then get to design the layout of my survey. I got to decide the boldness of the title and the colours that were in the survey. This is important as it has to look visually appealing as some people might not fill it out due to it not looking visually appealing.

I then started to add questions. SurveyMonkey produced some suggestions so I used them, this then set up the answers, I added an 'other' which gives them a chance to disclose this information or suggest other genders that they are. I made this question compulsory to answer as it is key to being able to categorize my results. I only gave a certain number of characters if they specified 'other' as this restricts them to giving unhelpful answers, although they still can it is harder for them to as I have restricted the characters.

   

I then came across another problem. Due to me only having a free basic account there is a limit on questions. I then had to incorporate some questions into one another for me to get all the data I required, for example two questions I had was 1. What is your gender and 2. What is your age, I then made these two questions into one by increasing the categories (e.g male 13 or below, female 14-16) that they could answer. I also had to eliminate questions which weren't going to give me the exact answers I needed, one of the questions I removed was 'how often do you log onto social networking' I did this as I felt that a previous question 'what social networking sites do you use' gave me a similar answer and that me not knowing the amount of times a person logs on to a social media site is less important than knowing what music magazine they currently read.