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Please help! Anonymous Survey on Real-Time Analytics (spreadsheets.google.com)
10 points by zeit_geist on June 17, 2011 | hide | past | favorite | 7 comments


If you are using this survey to analyze your market potential I think you should be careful with your wording.

First, I would avoid asking Would you consider using… because it's not really relevant to you. Any good business person would consider using whatever you're building. I think it's better to ask: Before starting this survey, had you ever considered x

Also, I think some of your terms (Real-time, analytics, public data stream) are a bit jargony which means people might not understand them and abandon the survey (thus skewing it to the opinions of people who understand) or worse, think they know what they mean when they don't mean the same thing as what you are talking about.

Edit: Also wanted to add that you should probably add an 'I don't know' or 'I can't answer this question' option to prevent people from abandoning and to help determine which questions people don't understand.


Po, thank you for your great hints. They are all highly appreciated. We will rework our survey accordingly and repost it in some days.


Eek! Defaults are all "yes" == bad survey design!


Well, also not asking your company size, market or any other context also shows bad survey design.

Also 'public data stream' seems a bad term. Google keywords tool seems to fit that description to me.


Hell, even stock tickers fit the description of "public data stream"


<30 seconds is considered real-time? At the company I used to work for, all clients around the world had to get the same data in <1 second.

Does there exist a definition of "real-time" that can be used across industries?


Not really, it depends on the context and is somewhat of a relative word (like "fast"). I personally interpret "real time" as "practically instant".

In the case of RT analytics, there's probably very small practical difference between 1s and 30s: it's typically dwarfed by the reaction time of the observer (what advantage is there in reacting 29s seconds sooner?).

In the case of something like a stock trading tool, 29s could make a huge difference and it's not practically the same as knowing instantly.




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