The wrong survey
After spending most of the day referring to the Census Bureau web site as one part of writing a guide to finding demographic statistics, I finally gave in to the repeated requests to fill out a survey, just to get the damned thing from popping up again.
I got even more annoyed when it became clear that almost none of the questions pertained to me. Was it easy to find the information I needed? Well, yeah, but that could be because I've been using that site routinely since the day it went online, so I kinda know my way around. Which sections did I use? Hmm, no option for "all of the above". And would I recommend the site to other people? Well, since I'm actually writing a guide full of links to the site that's technically yes, but there are also plenty of cases where I'm directing people to alternate sources for the same data.
At the end, I really doubt my answers are going to be of any use to the Census web designers. But then, that seems to be the case with most user surveys, which seem to exist mainly to provide work for people who write user surveys.
I got even more annoyed when it became clear that almost none of the questions pertained to me. Was it easy to find the information I needed? Well, yeah, but that could be because I've been using that site routinely since the day it went online, so I kinda know my way around. Which sections did I use? Hmm, no option for "all of the above". And would I recommend the site to other people? Well, since I'm actually writing a guide full of links to the site that's technically yes, but there are also plenty of cases where I'm directing people to alternate sources for the same data.
At the end, I really doubt my answers are going to be of any use to the Census web designers. But then, that seems to be the case with most user surveys, which seem to exist mainly to provide work for people who write user surveys.