Description:
Background on the Survey
The World-Wide Web is clearly one of the most popular Internet resources. Yet because of its distributed, global nature, very little is known about its users, their characteristics, and why they are using the Web. A better understanding of these users, and their reasons for accessing the Web will lead to improved development of Web related tools and technologies as well as make the Web more usable by all users. The Graphics, Visualization, & Usability (GVU) Center's World Wide Web User Surveys are a public service effort to address these issues. To date, over 100,000 responses have been collected through nine surveys and a basic analysis of responses is available to the public for free. These resuts are cited very widely and are used by researchers, developers, businesses and policy makers for a variety of purposes. The survey contains questions on: demographics, web usage, privacy, online purchasing, virtual banking, politics, webmasters, web authors and others. It is one of the more high-profile projects in the GVU Center.The Problem
The data collected from the survey, along with hundreds of graphs, analysis and related documents are all available on our website: http://www.gvu.gatech.edu/user_surveys/. We also maintain an email address for people to send questions which receives hundreds of emails per month. The content and quantity of these emails suggests that many users have trouble finding information on our site. (Another hypothesis is that some users don't even try to find the information themselves and would rather just ask us.) What should we do so that users can more easily find what they need? How can we decrease the amount of email we have to deal with?