Questions about Questions

As part of our year-20 festivities and events, we're planning on having a survey go out to basically all members—that is, it will be promoted to anyone who logs in, and up top in the State of the Thing.

The idea is to give people a chance to tell us what they think about LibraryThing, what they like and don't like, where they want it to go, etc. Talk, of course, is an excellent source for such information, but this would be targeted at everyone, not just the 30% who do Talk. Also, since it would be structured data, we could analyze it against member data. For example, what do members with more than 500 books want, versus ones with fewer? What do new members want vs. long-timers?

Anyway, here's your chance to contribute. I do not want your opinions on any of these topics! Rather, I want your opinion on what we should ask.

You can assume we have the ability to ask both multiple-choice and free-text questions.

it will be promoted to anyone who logs in, and up top in the State of the Thing

Will we be able to see it (on the site rather than in SotT) even if we’re perma-logged in? I never log out of LT.

>2 PawsforThought: Yes, probably a notification. Maybe a banner.

There are so many possible questions.

What would make you leave LT and choose another way to catalog your reading and your books?
Do you understand what an edition layer is, and if so, how important would it be to you?
Do you want en emailed notification when someone replies to you in Talk?
What would make you use Talk more?
If your native language is not English, do you use that language version of LT? If not, why not?

>4 anglemark:

Do you understand what an edition layer is, and if so, how important would it be to you?

Better: Give a definition of "edition layer", and then ask: How important would this be to you, and why?

You probably have a very good idea about the hottest or most controversial recommended site improvements—I’d definitely ask what people think about those.

1. Demographics. It feels like the user base of the site (or at least the part of it that is most active and visible) is aging and not a lot has been done to appeal to the younger set. What does our population pyramid actually look like? How do we address this? Or do we all just want the kids off the lawn?

2. Participation. What would get people to participate more in terms of adding to awards, series, and the like?

3. How do you feel about the site learning curve? What about the available resources? Have the Wiki and Talk managed to cover things for you? Would a program to either create documentation or to spur and organize the creation of documentary resources by members be helpful?

(I have vague thoughts of video demos of cool site mechanics. Perhaps starting to answer 1, those may be a way to reach the sufficiently nerdy or geeky portions of the TikTok set?)

>7 davidgn: Demographics. It feels like the user base of the site (or at least the part of it that is most active and visible) is aging and not a lot has been done to appeal to the younger set. What does our population pyramid actually look like? How do we address this? Or do we all just want the kids off the lawn?

I think this is true (at least, I'm aging), and it's a good question. But I think a big part of it answers itself: A book cataloging site is more significant to people who have physical books than to those who were brought up on e-books. Want to know if a book is on your Kindle/Nook/iPad? Look at the list of books on your device.

So this suggests questions about how LT can better serve the needs of people in the era of electronic books -- while still maintaining the features us Old Fogeys want, of course.

Where do you use LibraryThing most often? Home, work, school, library, other
Where did you first hear about LibraryThing?
Why did you decide to use LibraryThing instead of (or in addition to) other similar sites?

>7 davidgn:

It feels like the user base of the site (or at least the part of it that is most active and visible) is aging

Well, other than the kids who start all those pointless groups and are trying to get around their schools' blocking of websites.

(Lilithcat is feeling a bit grumpy.)

The suggestions so far are excellent. Personally I think I'd focus on asking questions relating to user engagement and the general 'stickiness' of the site.

Initially I joined LT more or less just to make a simple list of my physical books that wouldn't get lost and that I could easily share with friends. But after being here for awhile and exploring the site, I've found myself getting more and more invested in establishing a presence in and being part of the community. In all seriousness LT has rapidly become one of my primary social media sites.

I relate this because I often find myself wishing there were more ways to engage with the community and the site. Perhaps asking people what sort of features would make them want to spend longer periods of time on the site?

Question - Member relations
1) Do you feel Librarything does enough to limit abusive/disruptive members?
2) A member has broken the Terms of Service. What do you recommend starting steps be?
3) A member has flaunted the fact they are still on the site after multiple TOS breaches. What should the response be?

Question - Site Function
1) What features did you abandon at other sites that you'd like to see possibly implemented here?
2) Why did you chose to join Librarything - Catalog books, free book giveaways, Talk, other?
3) Do you understand what the base function of Librarything?
4) If you've explored the Recommended Site Improvement group in the last six months, what three recommendations do you think should be prioritized?

Question - Book Cataloging
1) The site has seen major adjustments to cataloging fields. What new fields do you recommend that are not able to be worked into existing fields already?
2) If you were to break the UI features so fields could be on separate tabs/turned off, how would you separate them?

If you want members to actually answer your survey, it has to be short and easy to answer. At the very least it needs to be easy to skip questions.

>13 MarthaJeanne:

Yes, it's a real tension.

>13 MarthaJeanne: >14 timspalding: Perhaps the main survey is short, but the last question asks if you want to take a more in-depth survey?

>15 Foretopman: Yeah, I was thinking that.

>15 Foretopman: >16 timspalding: Or even more in-depth survey on a *specific subject area*?

Let people provide feedback on the bits that interest them the most.

(One of the interesting things about LT is that people use it in so many disparate ways that don't even overlap.)

Question to ask: How do you add books, and why do you do it that way?

There are folks who only ever type in titles and nothing else.

I'm interested in finding out what appeals about StoryGraph vs LibraryThing, but I'm not sure how much overlap in users there is to get that info.

These are what I suspect:
1. heavy promotion of the site/app as created & owned by Black women (when I see it on bsky, that's often a big hook)

2. tap-and-go - minimal effort needed to add a book?

3. review prompts/polls that appeal to a certain kind of BookTok, Instagram, etc, reader - are the characters diverse, is it character or plot driven, are they likable, and about content warnings
(these questions are awful for most books, imo, and i think LT tags do a decent job of warning about most topics that people might not want to go into without warning)

4. pretty graphs, UI (darkmode), app
(which LT has or is working on)

5. support for indy books

it's the alternative to GR these days, the place where all the young people and indy romance readers seem to be going. But I want them here, to balance all of us aging curmudgeons who read non-fiction and sff.

Maybe you could ask what people were looking for when they joined LT, compared to what they actually find important now that they’ve been using it for at least X years. They could rate options like
- Basic inventory control (tracking books acquired, borrowed, lent or discarded, avoiding duplicates)
- Tracking my reading and engaging with other readers
- Finding out about books I’d like to read
- Working with tags and library classification systems to shelve and retrieve my books
- Recording bibliophile data about my book collection (editions, conditions and prices)
- General chat about the world of books

What ponys would most interest you - where should developers be focusing their time?
Which bits of the site do you use (as free text)
Which bits are you aware of (as multichoice)
I suspect the length of time on site will have a weird correlation here - I know there are a lot of new(er) features that I've never got to grips with
How has your usage changed over time?
What influenced this?
Why would you (not) recommend LT to others?

As I personally have a hard time finding certain pages (this becomes obvious every time there is a hunt) I would suggest a question along the lines of "Do you know where to find page X/function X?"

>21 reading_fox: I'm glad you think you could answer those questions at all, never mind in a short time. I certainly can't.

BTW Besides dropping out of surveys for too complicated questions, I also drop out after filling the whole &%7& thing if suddenly at the end I am asked to give personal information. If you are going to ask for personal information, please do it up front, and make it optional.

If you are going to try to get a measure of geographic diversity, you need to be clear what you want to ask about, and make it clear in the question. Passport(s)? Place of birth? Ethnic or cultural sense of belonging? Current or past residences? These are often related, but not always.

BTW Besides dropping out of surveys for too complicated questions, I also drop out after filling the whole &%7& thing if suddenly at the end I am asked to give personal information. If you are going to ask for personal information, please do it up front, and make it optional.

Yes. I could see asking for age, optionally. The rest I don't care about. Doing it on LT means we would know the personal information we care about—how many books you've cataloged, whether you use Talk, etc.

>24 timspalding: You also already know "LT age," which is a useful demographic distinction--new users versus old-timers.

Do you use other book related apps/websites? Why? What do LT and/or the others have that makes you use more than one?

>14 timspalding:

If available, you could build a battery of questions and then randomly deliver a subset of those questions to each user. This allows for more questions but doesn't require each respondent to answer all of them. It does rely upon a enough responses so that each question hits your minimum for reliability.

I would ask a free text question capturing the recent conversation on Where Is LT Heading?, specifically: "How could LT better facilitate book-specific discussions?"

>24 timspalding:
Friendly neighborhood survey methodologist here to point out that designing and implementing surveys that get you the useful info you want to know, in a format you can use, may be harder than it can at first appear. I'm happy to answer questions from the team about it, if you want.

>8 waltzmn: Re electronic books, for a person who only buys from a single source, LT is probably irrelevant; you just look at the list of books on your device. For someone like me who gets ebooks from multiple sources, LT is a godsend.

>29 Maddz: For me as well. I regularly buy from about half a dozen different sites and occasionally from a couple more, so having a list of my ebooks here is very helpful.

>29 Maddz:

I'll accept that. But it's probably less obvious that one needs LibraryThing when everything is electronic. :-)

Not sure how broad or specific this survey is going to go. I am cutting myself off at 10 questions. Many of these questions are around various discussion threads. However this might generate a broader input from users that did not see specific discussion threads or don't use the Talk area.

1. Of data already inputted into Librarything what other charts or graphs might be helpful?

2. What additional field(s) in your books area would be helpful?

3. We have an average (#) of recommendations that no one has commented if a good fit. How could we get more users to help us review some of these recommendations?

4. Under the add books area what other sources would be helpful?

5. What other talk groups might be interesting and would you be interested in being an administrator?

6. What current sources are not working at all or not pulling all options with current mediums as it should be pulling?

7. What format of help info would help new users and existing users currently understand more of the site and fields?

8. What features in the talk area would help?

9. In the talk area do you ever add to one of your previous comment boxes and if so why?

10. What features in the local area might be helpful?

>28 reconditereader: You want to get early access to what we have to make suggestions?

>33 timspalding: That'd be cool, if you think it would help you. I'd want to talk with you first, to see how you intend to use the data and what you hope to ask with this dataset.
Survey design is a part of my job I don't get to use enough anymore!

I would be interested primarily in cataloguing questions, pertaining to new fields people want or new functions to do with their books, or collections, or with their catalogue as a whole. RSIs. Pinch points with adding or editing books.

I am curious, but less so, about how people use the fields that already exist. Which fields do you use always, sometimes, never? Which would you use if they were 'easier' (and how could they be made easier for you)? Are there fields you use in ways other than the "intended" purpose? (I, for one, use 'From where?' to indicate which section of the library a book is in, and the menu of previous input makes that field perfectly suited for such use).

For that matter, I'm curious about cataloguing non-books. If you have things like films or music that you catalogue, do you use LT or a different service, and why? If you use LT, what features would you want changed or added to improve your experience with cataloguing non-books specifically? If you don't use LT, what features would convince you to make the move? If you are one of the people who catalogues some really out-there items like fabric or perfume... I would like to pick your brain personally...

I'm really curious about people who are actively hostile towards adding features which no one would force them to use (the hostility is what made me quit posting in RSI) but I'm not sure any survey question could really get me answers about that...

>8 waltzmn:, >31 waltzmn:, >29 Maddz:, >30 amanda4242:

Since 2014, I've been reading books (almost) exclusively in electronic form on an eReader.
I get most of these books from various online libraries.
For me, the usefulness of LT hasn't changed. It's still enormous.
But I do miss some information and/or features that would help me manage my books.
I really hope that a survey will address this aspect as well.

I would never judge how a book is read. It makes absolutely no difference to understanding whether a book is read on parchment, paper, or on a screen. *A blind person would also be accused of reading the book with their fingertips using Braille embossed on paper, of mechanically transcribing it with pens on a device, or of listening to it as spoken text. My mother, in her final years (90+), would have still liked to read her books in paper form, which was no longer possible because of her eyesight. But she was very happy that an eReader enabled her to read until her final days.
So we should stop pitting one form of text capture against another. I would like to see more tolerance towards the different uses of LT.
I miss this in many discussions. Fortunately, not in this thread.

I hope this text doesn't come across as too accusatory or moralizing. It's meant to point out the many equally valid uses of LT.

Changed for a correction:
* A blind person would never be accused of reading the book with their fingertips using Braille embossed on paper, …

Apologies for what may come off as a bit of a lecture. I find myself thinking here that perhaps we're missing the point a little. @reconditereader may well do more surveys than I do, but I'm also a data analyst, and I find myself wondering what the meaning is of a lot of these questions.

So: Why would LT need a survey? Answer: To decide what to do next. But that decision has certain constraints. It has to be something that LT can do. Want it to be able to scan book barcodes using your computer's video camera rather than a CueCat? Probably possible. Want it to determine your wish list by reading your mind? Unlikely to be possible, and you probably wouldn't like it if it were. :-)

So think in terms of feature implementation. Example: Want more information about books? I know I do. But what sort? Personally, I'd like commentaries, easier ways to find reviews, a better way to manage items in Talk. Your mileage may differ. How does it differ? Questions need to relate to specific features: How to implement then and how popular each implementation would be. Open-ended questions, for instance, are hard to analyze; results need to be categorized. So think in terms of categorization. And in terms of difficulty of implementation.

And, if you know anything about coding, it might also be worth thinking about what might be fun to code, because that's frankly more likely to get done sooner.

>36 birder4106: So what are you asking about? (Technically, the pages field now allows for times to enter for audio books. They haven't updated the field for file size yet.)

>38 gilroy: Of course, file size depends. When I download my ebooks, the first thing I do is run a conversion to deal with oversized illustrations (which are superfluous on a B&W eink screen). So input which: the original file size or the compressed file size?

Again, many ebooks have embedded fonts which again are superfluous; I override on the ereader to one that's easy on my eyes. They get stripped out too.

>37 waltzmn: Oh I'm totally on board with this, which is what I meant by "what you hope to ask with this dataset". Response options are important. What you intend to do with the results is super important. Deciding what to do next is only one potential reason for a survey.

You learn a lot about how to design questions once you start having to analyze the answers to them! (-:,

>38 gilroy: Do people with ebooks largely consider file-size a metric similar to pages or audio-length? I certainly don't (and the majority of my catalogued books are ebooks until I move somewhere where I can finally bring all my physical books). In fact, I find file-size completely irrelevant on LT. I only ever check the combined storage my books take if running out of storage on a device. Besides, it largely depends on the amount of images contained, so not indicative of the length of the book.

I do keep track of pages for ebooks. It often comes from a source, I suspect in the same way I 'calculate' them when it's empty, by taking the pages of the equivalent physical edition.

>40 reconditereader: Oh I'm totally on board with this, which is what I meant by "what you hope to ask with this dataset".

I know. Me too. I believe we're in agreement. I'm making suggestions to those who are suggesting questions that either won't give useful data or will result in suggestions that can't be implemented.

Survey design matters, and survey goals influence design. A lot.

We have a few goals.

"What do we do next?" is not actually the main question. We have a section for that, but it's not the focus.

Instead of that, we're just looking to understand our members better—who they are, what they do online, what they value, what they know, how they use the site, etc. As developers we have a certain view of members, but it's highly colored by the people we talk to, and who talk the loudest. As I've noted before, something like 6% of members who put significant time into the site post to talk. We're hoping that some of the people who don't post to Talk will be willing to take a survey. Some of the questions are aimed at them. For example, there's a question about what would make use our social features, or use it more.

Apart from hearing from the unheard, I think it's useful to touch base in a forum that's not about one particular feature or problem. And it's helpful to get feedback all together in a structured format. This is particularly useful for the LibraryThing staff who don't read Talk every day as I do. This will catch them up. Even the few of us who do Talk to members every day don't always agree about what drives members and what they want. It will be a reality check for us.

Beyond, we have one question that asks members to speculate about people who don't use the site. Many members will have friends who use another site. Others can speak to their initial reactions. If we could recruit 1,000 book lovers who don't use LibraryThing, we'd do that. Absent that, we have to ask members to speculate.

As regards features, we're well aware of the issues. We weigh the value, effort needed and indeed the fun of it. We're also keenly aware that, as Henry Ford said, "If I asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." One of the questions essentially puts a car, a helicopter and a moped in front of people, and asks "Which do you want?" While Talk is good for such things, it's so self selecting. I expect the survey format and audience will generated some surprises.

We also ask age, gender and what other big sites people use (e.g., Facebook, Instagram). They are, of course, optional. But I think we'll find them useful. I got some pushback on this internally. The argument was "Why does gender matter?" The answer is that demographic information is a basic part of understanding your market, and if LibraryThing had a single marketing person, they would back me up. I demonstrated this to staff by showing them charts of the gender and age distributions of several sites we compare ourselves to.* LibraryThing stood out from the others as having a smaller proportion of women and young people. It's striking and it's worth asking "Why?" I think it will be interesting to see how age and gender correlate with other factors. If, for example, we want more young people, we might want to listen to them on why they don't like and what they want more or better.

* The data was compiled by similarweb, a marketing firm that samples internet traffic and makes guesses. I don't trust the magnitude of the numbers, but I trust the differences between sites.

>41 SandraArdnas: I use file size as something as a proxy for reading length. Pages for ebooks I find irrelevant: that depends on your settings for font, font size, margins and screen size. I use a Calibre plug-in to calculate page and word count, but I only track word count. Even that is suspect, as that will include title pages, marketing guff, indices and the like. What might be useful is number of chapters.

>44 Maddz: How can it be a proxy of the length when the difference between 100 and 1000 pages of pure text is negligible? Add to that that anything with images will quickly balloon in size, even if it has only 50 pages, but 10 of those are images.

Pages of physical editions can also vary significantly based on font and page size for the same text, they are just tied to a specific edition, which makes them 'correct'. But for evaluating the size of the book, actual page count of any of the editions tells me more than file size. Don't mean to argue, haha, just puzzled

>45 SandraArdnas: My rule of thumb is that anything under 0.5 Mb can be safely read on my commute (55 minutes) and anything over that is best left until the weekend or evening. Either way, I don't bother recording page count for my ebooks, not that I bother for paper books either.

>43 timspalding:

As I've noted before, something like 6% of members who put significant time into the site post to talk. We're hoping that some of the people who don't post to Talk will be willing to take a survey. Some of the questions are aimed at them. For example, there's a question about what would make use our social features, or use it more.

This is me. I only look at the FAQ, Talk about LT, Combiners, and Bug Collectors discussion areas but I will happily answer a survey because I love this website.

I don't have any feedback about questions that could be asked (and the reason that I don't use the social parts of this site is I've never been a particularly social person when it comes to interacting with people that I don't know which is everyone on this website), but I'm also happy to say that in a survey so that it's documented and compiled in metrics.

>47 darius52:

Thank in you in advance.

Okay, the survey is out. I'm looking forward to all your answers!

https://www.librarything.com/survey.php?source=talk

Feel free to talk about the survey here: https://www.librarything.com/topic/373965