The second evaluation of the user-friendliness of our survey
I designed a survey, which was hosted on Qualtrics, to gather information on medical students' self-rated levels of comfort behaviors when discussing issues related to sexuality in a clinical setting, knowledge on the topic of sex, personality traits, and demographics at baseline (i.e. prior to the intervention/their attendance of the workshops).
It is essential that any research tool is easily understandable and usable. After a survey is designed, the first level of assessment that I would typically employ is a heuristic evaluation. Insights from this assessment would inform the redesign of the survey. The second level of assessment would be a usability test.
In this section, I describe how usability tests were conducted on the survey.
Learn about the research
This was part of a research project that I designed and led with a multinational team of educators, practitioners, and researchers. Findings from this study were published in a Q1 academic journal, Sex Education.
Usability tests of the baseline survey
Usability test 1: We recruited five undergraduate students to pilot-test the survey and provide feedback. Below is the instruction that they were provided.
"Thank you for agreeing to complete the survey. Please read the instructions and items carefully and make note of anything that comes to mind as you go through it. Once you have completed the survey, I will invite you to share your thoughts with me and ask you further questions about your experience. Please be assured that there are no right or wrong answers or opinions. What we value is your honest feedback."
From these tests, we identified two key issues:
- Some of the questions felt repetitive. In our survey, we asked participants how frequently they talked about sexual behaviors with their close friends, classmates, and family (i.e., three separate questions). We asked the same three questions concerning (instead of sexual behaviors) sexual and gender identity, substance use, mental health issues, religious beliefs, and politics. While participants recognized that this set of questions pertained to different topics, they reported feeling disengaged due to the similarity in questions.
- Some questions seemed out of place. Some participants reported that questions from a cultural orientation measure seemed random and unrelated to the other questions.