Lesson video

Hi, I'm Miss McGoldrick, and thanks for joining me today for our design and technology lesson on questionnaires.

And this lesson is part of our unit where we investigate and research a high-profile event.

So let's get started.

Our lesson outcome is I can design and conduct effective questionnaires to inform designing.

Our keywords for this lesson are questionnaire, a structured set of questions designed to collect answers from multiple people.

A respondent, a person who provides answers to questions in a questionnaire.

Target market, a specific group of consumers identified as the most likely audience for a product or a service or an experience.

And lastly, a design decision, a deliberate choice that informs designing.

Our first lesson outline is questionnaires.

A questionnaire is a structured set of questions designed to collect answers from multiple respondents.

And a respondent, or respondents, are individuals who answer these questions.

Questionnaires target a specific group of consumers known as the target market, and they are most likely to engage with the product or a service or experience.

A questionnaire is a form of primary research, and that is because the researcher is the person that is collecting the data or the information firsthand.

And questionnaires collect data on lots of different things.

Preferences, so what people prefer and not prefer.

Needs and wants.

Behaviours, so for example, kind of an insight into the target market daily routines.

Attitudes, how are people feeling about particular products or topics.

And engagement.

So our first check.

A questionnaire is a structured set of interviews, decisions or questions.

Pause the video here, have a go.

Okay, so the answer is questions.

Well done if you got that right.

So in the context of designing, a target market is a group of people who the product is designed for.

Preferences are what people need and want from a product, service, or experience.

And questionnaires allow us to understand what the preferences of our target market are.

So questionnaires are very important as they can inform our designing.

And they can also provide us with evidence to justify our design decisions.

A design decision is a deliberate choice that informs our designing.

So for example, when we're choosing colours of products, we shouldn't really, as designers, just choose our favourite colour, okay? We should have a reason why we're choosing that colour.

And the reason should go back to, you know, results of questionnaires or maybe interviews.

So a designer has created this lamp here.

They have used the results of a target market questionnaire and they're gonna use those results to inform their designing.

So let's have a check.

Questionnaires inform designing and provide evidence for stakeholders, evidence to justify design decisions, evidence for the target market, or evidence to plot in a graph.

Pause the video, have a go.

Okay.

So questionnaires inform designing and provide evidence to justify those design decisions.

Okay? Quite a lot of the time, people conduct questionnaires, really good questionnaires, and collect the data and then never do anything with that data, apart from maybe present it in a graph.

And what should be happening is the results of that questionnaire should be used to help us make design decisions when we are designing.

So the results can inform design decisions such as colour, shape, materials, style, and size of products.

So an example of a question from the questionnaire that informed the design of the lamp that we can see on the slide here could be, "What are your preferred colours for home furnishings?" So home furnishings are things like lamps and various other pieces of furniture.

And the result of that questionnaire will have been grey.

So the design decision is that the lampshade colour is grey.

It's not just the favourite colour of the designer.

It has come from the results of the questionnaire that has come from the target market identified for that product.

Let's have a go at a task.

So a designer has created a travel mug.

They have made the following design decisions after collecting results from a target market questionnaire.

So a designer has designed a travel mug.

They made design decisions on that travel mug from the results of a target market questionnaire.

Things like the colour of the travel mug, or the colours used, 'cause there's more than one colour, the size of the mug, the materials used for the body and the lid, and the style of the mug.

So have a go at completing this table.

And you're gonna do that by adding an example question that could be used in a target market questionnaire to inform the design decisions for the travel mug.

So on the left-hand side of that table, you've got your design decision.

So the colours used, the materials used for the body and the lid, the style of the mug, and the size of the mug.

Can you think of an example question that would've led to a result that has informed the design of the travel mug? Pause the video here, have a go, and we'll have some feedback.

So your answer could be, here we go, okay, so we've got our table and we've put in some example questions.

So for the design decision, the colours used, in a target market questionnaire, an example question related to colours could have been, "What is your preferred colour for a travel mug?" And if we look at our travel mug, it had a red lid and a silver body.

So those two colours may have been the colours that came out as the biggest result, the kind of final result.

So the materials used for the body and the lid.

So a question could have been, "What material properties are important to you when choosing a travel mug to purchase?" And maybe, for example, the body is made out of stainless steel.

So maybe people wrote a kind of answer in the questionnaire of, "I would like strength, but it's being lightweight." And that would also relate to the lid potentially being made of some form of polymer, okay? Like polypropylene, which also gives strength and kind of lightweight properties as well.

The style of the mug, okay, so a question could be, "What type of design style do you prefer for a travel mug? For example, a bold style." So it is quite bold, the travel mug, the example one, it's got a brightly coloured lid and it's got, you know, a stainless steel body and it's got some interesting, quite sharp kind of shapes to its form.

But people may have responded to that question asking for a more traditional style of travel mug, one that looks more like an actual mug instead of looking more like an elongated shape like that one.

And finally, the size of the mug.

So a question that could have been asked that has led to design decisions relating to the size could have been, "How important is the size of a travel mug in terms of fitting into your bag, car cup holder, or backpack?" And for me, that's a really, really important question, as I take my travel mug around with me in my backpack.

So it's really important that it's able to fit into the pockets at the sides.

So our second lesson outline is creating questions.

Now, very similar to an interview, it's really good practise to identify question topics, and this will help you construct a relevant and effective questionnaire.

So relevant questions are ones that directly address the context, and it's really important throughout your entire investigations and your research phase to remember what your context is, always.

And avoiding non-relevant questions is gonna help us, you know, produce an effective questionnaire.

So an effective questionnaire is gonna really help us to identify and provide evidence for design decisions.

And it's not just there for us to produce some graphs out of that we can present.

Now, there are many types of questions that can be used in a questionnaire, and the most commonly used question types are closed questions, so these are the type of questions that allow respondents to give a very short, specific, quick response.

Things like, yes, no, true, false.

Open-ended questions, they allow more freedom, more flexibility, and they're usually kind of longer writing questions that allow respondents to voice an opinion.

Checkboxes.

So they allow respondents to select multiple answers, kind of options.

And rank order, okay, allows respondents to rank items in order of importance to them.

Time for a check.

So checkbox questions allow respondents to, select one answer option, select the correct answer option, or select multiple answer options.

Pause the video here, have a go.

Okay, so checkbox questions allow respondents to select multiple answer options.

Well done if you've got that right.

Using the context of an outdoor music festival, which is a high-profile event, an example of a closed type question that's relating to an outdoor music festival in a questionnaire is multiple choice.

So that is a type of closed type question, 'cause we are giving very specific answers and there's not kind of freedom with our answers here.

Okay, we're gonna select what we can from whatever is in front of us.

So respondents will select one or more of the following answers.

So a multiple choice questionnaire question could look like this.

So question one, "How did you travel to the outdoor music festival?" And as you can see, I've got a variety of options or choices here, that I can select one of those from.

Another example of a closed type question in a questionnaire is a dichotomous question.

Okay, so a question with two possible answers.

So for example, yes or no, or true or false, and dichotomous means divided or involving two distinct options, okay? So an example relating to our outdoor music festival is question two, "Did you carry a bag with you into the festival?" And the options for answers are Yes or No, and that is making it a dichotomous question.

Another example of a close type question in a questionnaire is a rating scale.

So this measures attitudes or opinions of the respondents on a scale of one to five maybe, or one to 10, or one to seven.

And it could look like this.

So question three, "Rate your overall experience of the festival." And we go from one, which is a poor experience, to five, which is an excellent experience, and you might lie somewhere kind of on that scale and you would kind of select where you feel you lie.

Okay, so we have something here called a Likert scale, and that is questions that measure agreement or disagreement with a statement.

So a Likert scale is very commonly used in questionnaires to measure respondents' attitudes, opinions, or perceptions by offering a scale of agreement.

So if we look at our example here, question four, we've got our statement, "It was difficult to move around the festival grounds." It's not a question, it's a statement.

And we are asking the respondent to either strongly disagree or disagree or be not quite sure or agree or strongly agree.

So where do they lie on that Likert scale? Time for a check.

The type of question that measures agreement and disagreement with a statement is called a rank scale question, a Likert scale question, a dichotomous question, or a multiple choice question? Pause the video here, have a go.

So the type of question that measures agreement and disagreement with a statement is called a Likert scale question.

Let's move on to open-ended questions now.

So an example of an open-ended question in a questionnaire relating to an outdoor music festival is, "Can you describe a challenge you have faced when attending an outdoor music festival?" So as you can see, there is a space there for kind of a longer written answer.

So open-ended questions are the type of questions that allow respondents to share their thoughts, experience, or opinions more freely.

So there's a lot more flexibility within these questions, okay.

Checkbox questions allow respondents to select multiple options from a list.

So for example, we may see something like question six, "Select your important factors when attending an outdoor music festival." And the respondent would be able to tick kind of one of those or multiple of those, so checkbox questions.

Oh, and these questions can clearly identify target market preferences.

Rank order questions.

So these are questions that ask respondents to rank items in order of importance or preference to them.

For example, question seven, "Rank the importance of these personal belongings when attending an outdoor music festival." So the respondent would go along and look at bag and decide kind of where on that rank they would fall.

So they could select a bag is least important, or they may select a bag is most important to me, and they would work their way down that list.

A check, a rank order question asks respondents to rank items in alphabetical order, order of appearance in the questionnaire, order of importance or preference, or chronological order.

Pause the video here, have a go.

Okay, so the answer is a rank order question asks respondents to rank items in order of importance or preference to them.

Time for our second task.

We are gonna choose a high-profile event that you have attended or that you are aware of.

For example, a sporting world cup, a music festival, or a royal event.

We are gonna identify that event, and you are gonna try and identify the target market for that event.

That is the first part, question one.

Question two is creating four questions you could use in a target market questionnaire for the events that you have identified in question one.

So you're gonna create one of each of the following types of questions.

You're gonna create a closed type question, an open-ended question, a checkbox question, and a rank order question.

So you're gonna identify the event, the high-profile event, like a sporting world cup or a outdoor music festival.

You're going to identify the most likely target market for that event.

Then you are gonna think of four questions that you could use in a questionnaire for that target market, making sure we cover closed question, open-ended question, checkbox question, and a rank order question.

So pause the video, have a go, then we'll have some feedback.

Some feedback for that task.

So question one, your answer could be, a high-profile event is an outdoor music festival and the target market for that event could include various segments of people, depending on the festival's genre.

The main groups of people that could be included in that target market are young adults, maybe between the ages of 18 to 35, people who love music, so music enthusiasts, local residents, people who live near the festival, and families.

So question two of the task was to generate four questions that could be in a questionnaire relating to the context of an outdoor music festival.

So our first question, which is a closed type of question, could be a Likert scale question like below.

So question, "It was difficult to move around the festival grounds," and we've got that scale there.

So we've got our statement and then we've got the scale of where we agree or we disagree.

An open-ended question could be, "Can you describe a challenge you have faced when attending an outdoor music festival?" And we've got space there for an answer that allows more freedom and more flexibility from the respondent.

A checkbox question could be, "Select your important factors when attending an outdoor music festival," and the respondent can select one, or kind of multiple options there.

And a rank order question could be, "Rank the importance of these personal belongings when attending an outdoor music festival," and we've got a list of personal belongings and then we're asking the respondent to rank between one and five how important that personal belonging is to them at an outdoor music festival.

Let's have a summary of this lesson.

So a questionnaire is a structured set of questions which are designed to collect answers from multiple respondents within a target market.

Questionnaires are really important when designing and providing evidence to justify design decisions.

Remember, questionnaires aren't just there as a task to do.

They have to be relevant, they have to be effective, and they have to inform your designing, and they are there as evidence for you making decisions when you are designing.

So an effective questionnaire will help achieve the desired purpose of the task.

And the most commonly used questions in questionnaires include closed type questions, open-ended type questions, checkbox, and rank order questions.

Thank you for joining me today for our lesson on questionnaires.