[volunteers] (forw) Re: Bikeshedding: svlug.org vs. www.svlug.org

[Rick Moen]

Passing along.

----- Forwarded message from J David Eisenberg <jdavid.eisenberg at gmail.com> -----

Date: Wed, 1 Sep 2010 16:21:16 -0700
From: J David Eisenberg <jdavid.eisenberg at gmail.com>
To: rick at linuxmafia.com
Subject: Bikeshedding: svlug.org vs. www.svlug.org

About a year or so ago we had a long discussion thread in svlug.org
about the message that you get when you type http://svlug.org

You said that I was bikeshedding, so I decided to run a quick
experiment to collect some data rather than making an "educated
guess." I made one website whose headline read "You're at the wrong
site!  Automatically redirecting in a moment." and another whose
headline read "One moment, please..."

I then made slips of paper, some with the first url
(http://catcode.com/b1) and some with the second url
(http://catcode.com/b2), shuffled the papers, and handed them out to
my Research Methods class. Both URLs redirected to a short survey
where I collected information about:

a) whether they remembered the message or not
b) whether they remembered it correctly or not
c) if they remembered it, how they felt about it
d) other questions that I used to demo the R statistics package for the class

Here are the results.

For the "Wrong site" message (16 people got that URL)
1 person out of the 16 did not remember the message.
The remaining 15 people remembered the message correctly.
Of those 15 people, 10 rated it impolite or very impolite.

For the "one moment please" message (20 people got that URL)
5 of the 20 people did not remember the message
Of the 15 people who remembered the message, 13 remembered it correctly.
Of those 13 people, all rated it polite or very polite.

So it appears that the "wrong site" message is indeed superior, as the
"one moment please" message induces memory loss in users.

If I can find another class to take the survey, I'll be happy to
change any of the questions or text that you'd like and collect more
data.

----- End forwarded message -----
----- Forwarded message from Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com> -----

Date: Wed, 1 Sep 2010 18:27:50 -0700
From: Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com>
To: J David Eisenberg <jdavid.eisenberg at gmail.com>
Subject: Re: Bikeshedding: svlug.org vs. www.svlug.org
Organization: If you lived here, you'd be $HOME already.

Quoting J David Eisenberg (jdavid.eisenberg at gmail.com):

> If I can find another class to take the survey, I'll be happy to
> change any of the questions or text that you'd like and collect more
> data.

Thank you very much for the offer, and for the thougtful study.

I'm presently on holiday in New Zealand and Australia, so I'm only
intermittantly using Internet access at all, but will bear your offer in
mind when I return.

I hope you won't mind my passing along to SVLUG's core volunteers your
results, as they are indeed interesting.


----- End forwarded message -----