Survey 2012
Summary
This page is dedicated to our first survey of our userbase, a link to this page was emailed to almost 15,000 of our users on 31st January 2012. The survey is now closed and we are analysing the results. First of all we would like to thank all of you that filled in our survey, we are happy with the number of responses we got. We gained a good overview of what you thought about WikiVet navigation, amount and quality of content as well as some useful suggestions. The interesting and encouraging fact was that many of your suggestions are already in the pipeline and we hope to implement them soon. Here is a brief summary of what we've found so far:
Demographics
56% of responders were Veterinary students, which broadly matches the Veterinary student % of our user base. 41% of responders were from the UK, 29% were from the rest of Europe and around 11% were from North America, which again is similar to our user base.
Usage of site
Around 44% of responders use WikiVet about once a month and about 36% use it more regularly than that. 75% of responders use WikiVet to find specific information, 66% use it to learn and 47% use it for revision.
Editing Content
20% of responders didn't know that they could edit content, which shows we have some more work to do! The main barrier to people editing content (32%) is that they're afraid they may write something that is inaccurate - we feel that this is probably a big reason why users are afraid to start a page, but hopefully you'll be braver when it comes to making small corrections?
The main way responders navigate around the site seems to be by using the search box, a lot are using the menu on the left of the page and on the front page too though. It seems that our search box works quite well, with only 3% of responders saying that the search function "never" or "almost never" finds what you're looking for efficiently. We've been reorganising a lot of pages so they're easier to find by the search function and through links, so hopefully this % will decrease even further in the future. It may also be that people couldn't find what they were looking for in the search because the page hasn't been created yet, which is a separate issue...
Content quality
We were really pleased to find out that most of you thought that our content was either OK, Good or Excellent, Good being the most common answer. We are aware there needs to be some improvements but as some of you already pointed out, the site has come along a lot since its first opening.
Usefulness of content
The majority of you thought that the text content is most important but all the other learning resource really add value to your learning experience. We will keep doing what we can in this area to improve our encyclopaedic content and bring you further learning resources too.
Site Features
Over half of responders didn't know what the PDF book creator was - it's really worth a look! Have a look at our help page to see how to use this cool feature. It seems that a lot of responders didn't know about our Facebook page (58%), Twitter feed (64%) or iTunes podcast (73%) - there are links at the top of the home page to the Facebook and Twitter pages and at the bottom of every newsletter, we'll try to make sure we tell more of you about them so you don't miss out!
Discussion
Thank you for all the encouraging comments we received and your continual support! We will be analysing the results in more detail over the coming weeks and hope to bring you more improvements. If you'd like to find our more about the results and discuss them with us, please feel free to join in the conversation in the discussion in our WikiVet group in NOVICE.