Created: May 10, 2022 8:55 PM Tags: Data Collection, SAT
For the data collection phase, two surveys were conducted.
The individuals of the Maths Club team were interviewed, along with a survey being sent out to the students who frequently attend the CGS Maths Club to gather their opinions. This encompasses both types of clients: those who are to consume the content (students) and content creators/admins (the maths club team). Links to both are below, respectively:
The main takeaways from the surveys would be the precise features that the clients want, a few that were not previously considered, such as a search function for the posts. Some results of this data were expected, such as the preference of platform:
- Website (#1.8 average)
- MacOS (#2.2 average)
- iOS/iPadOS (#2.4 average)
- Android (#3.8 average)
- Windows (#4.8 average)
- Linux (#6 average)
- WatchOS (#7 average)
On the other hand, some other conclusions were a bit more surprising, such as how almost half of the people that responded preferred completely doing the questions by hand on paper. This means that even though a majority would prefer to answer the questions online while working on paper, some people do not like the device element, so simplicity should be a focus, as if it is too unnecessarily complicated for a target audience that does not even want it, it will not be an effective solution.
The following is a "Pros and Cons" table of each of the features possibly requested or discussed:
| Idea | Pros | Cons |
|---|---|---|
| A search function to be able to look for specific posts, questions and sections | Makes the system more usable and easy to find what is being looking for, can search for specific questions people are discussing | May take some time to implement, and may make the UI more complex. This being said, pros probably outweigh cons |
| Quiz System/Ability to Answer Online | Makes it so clients can answer questions anywhere, creates a record and a sense of achievement | May be a bit more difficult and requires people to bring their devices, and about 40% of the responders said they fully preferred answering questions on paper |
| Divided Sections for Junior/Senior/Term | Good organisation, makes the app easier to navigate | May create a bit of a divide amongst the students and prevent good discussions |
| Leaderboards/Competitions | Creates a sense of competition and uses gamification to make the club more fun and rewarding | It might be hard to keep everything fair, like if someone was to view the answer beforehand, it might create a sense of false achievement and detract from the actual maths |
| Notifications for Posts | People know that maths club is running and they get notified! | It may be a little annoying, so it should probably be optional |
| Hints for Solutions | It provides a guide and a pathway that is more gratifying than just the solution | It may be a bit more effort to create hints and makes the usability on our end a bit worse |
| Being able to message users | Clients get to ask people for help and interact with the community | Could be a privacy concern with being a school app, and is probably a bit overboard |
| Forums/Ability to Comment on Posts | Probably a better version of the above, allows community interaction while being less overboard | Could also be a privacy concern, but is easier to moderate (or only allow “verified” users to comment) |
In summary, this data collection phase has been a good starting point to understand what the target audience wants in the app, which features would be more useful and which would not. Surprisingly, a lot of people really like the paper part of maths, so though the clients want to reduce paper usage, the app will have to remain simple, so it simply serves as a repository of questions along with a place to keep record of what has been answered before. There is about a 50% average for how many people use the website currently, so as of now it is not the most effective solution, namely because paper can be more convenient, but hopefully this app can change that, and it seems that most of the target audience agrees that it could be quite useful. With the current system, the surveyed audience like the simplicity, how quick it loads and how easy it is to access, but there are a few concerns such as ease of use on the management end, being able to search for questions and an online record that clients would like to see. Namely, the ability to comment on posts and a quiz system both ranked relatively highly in features the audience would like to see, followed by many of the features listed above. Messaging users most likely will not be seen in the app as it is just a bit too much for the scope of the project. As for platforms, the website, MacOS and iOS will be the priority, as they are the main ones platforms the audience seems to operate on.
Through the collection of data, various sources were able to provide a wide insight on the effectiveness and performance of a variety of software solutions. For reliability, data was collected from a sufficiently large sample size from both stakeholders, those who consume the content and those who produce the content. Getting information from a variety of age groups, both from the Junior and Senior school has proved beneficial, as it is clear that different demographics within the target audience have different priorities. This can be shown by the varying information supplied in the interviews, along with the surveys, along with the secondary data collected from internet research. All in all, it is safe to conclude that the data collected is sufficiently reliable, as it corroborates multiple sources, both primary and secondary with varying demographics, sample sizes and priorities. If the variation and confirmation from these multiple sources can be continually maintained, sources should remain of an acceptable reliability going into the future as well.