2014 Survey Results
At the end of 2014 I pushed a little survey out to you, our users asking how we’re doing. Only fair then, that I tell you what you said.
The survey was broken down into various categories and I’ll try and interpret what you meant by your votes. You can also View the results in full if you’d like.
Your Experience
The Your Experience section was trying to ascertain how you use the website, your familiarity with it. This will help interpret the results to come.
The big take for me personally was 77% of you would recommend the website to a friend.
That tells me we must be doing something right!*
* Granted people who find the website useful, are also more inclined to fill in the survey. But I’m still taking this as a huge positive 
First Impressions
A bit of a mixed bag with this one. On the one hand 69% found their experience intuitive and they felt guided through the process (78%).
On the other hand 45% didn’t realise help was available and 59% weren’t aware of the tour button on most screens.
It would appear from those stats that we’re good at helping when you first start, but it isn’t obvious that help still exists. Clearly I need to address this and I am planning to revisit the content of the website and add more videos to help.
How it works now
Without question the most surprising votes were for the What do you think of the volume of e-mail you receive? question.
The underlying tenant of toepoke since the first version back in 2010! has always been:
- Do all we can to ensure a match goes ahead
- Don’t spam people
For example the website send out an invitation to all your members at the start of your match week. A few days later we’ll send a second invite out to anyone who has yet to answer, but only if you’re still short of players.
I’d fully expected the answer to this to be too much. It’s really encouraging that the results of your votes suggest that the balance is being maintained.
The ratings however is quite split. I think it is one of those features you either love or hate.
Looking at the [website] stats suggests not everyone is using the ratings feature. But given the number of you that seem to like it I’m of the opinion that whilst the feature offers value, perhaps not in their current form.
I’m inclined to revisit the ratings to simplify it just to:
- Fitness
- Ability
- Effort
Rather than breaking it down by Goalkeeping, Defending and Attacking. A revisit of the user interface may also help in this regard.
Disagree? Feel free to add a comment.
Lastly in this category the results for existing features and learning to use new features suggest I need to look at how to better illustrate how they are used. Most probably with some videos, and more prominent placing.
Payments
Another which was split right down the middle was the subject of on-line payments.
The majority of those who would like to pay on-line were drawn to PayPal. This makes sense as it’s been around for a long time and lots of people already use it for eBay rather than the relatively new Stripe.
Sadly having a nominal fee to go with payments was frowned upon. Perhaps if I’d phrased the question better and explained that it was to support the running of the website the answers would have been different.
Payments may appear in the future, and whilst it goes against the votes it will most likely use Stripe. Having looked into supporting payments already, PayPal is much, much, much more difficult to deal with.
I see Stripe becoming increasingly more visible now it’s being used by Twitter and Facebook for payments.
SMS
Surprisingly in this smartphone world, text messaging is still popular. This is born out by 50% saying they may use it.
Encouragingly some of you are also happy to pay a nominal fee to use text messaging.
Ironically I would most likely do the Payments feature first as the infrastructure it provides would need to be in place to provide SMS messaging support.
Phone App
There certainly seems to be an appetite for a smartphone with 72% expressing a preference for a mobile app. Interestingly the survey went out after the mobile website version was released.
Again there is a reluctance to pay for an app version with a clear 50% of you saying they’d only use a free version and 27% being happy with the mobile version.
I feel the mobile version offers a sufficiently usable experience on mobile devices for the time being and will continue to be developed alongside the desktop version.
I may revisit an app version in the future, but given the volume of work involved I think my efforts can be better utilised elsewhere in the website.
Local Matches
I asked this to see if there was an appetite for a feature I’ve been thinking about.
It’s good to see that you’re interested. It’s a big change so it’s helpful to know there’s an interest, so I’ll put this on the back burner. Again I think I can offer more value elsewhere on the website for the foreseeable future.
Signing off
In conclusion I think the survey has been a worthwhile exercise. It’s helped me understand what works for you, and what doesn’t. I can certainly see us doing another in the future. Remember you can view the results in full if you’d like.
If there’s anything you’d like to add, or anything you think should be covered in the future, please add a comment, or open a suggestion.
Posted in : toepoke