Gathering Qualitative Feedback: Creating A Questionnaire

After creating the 15 characters from franken-concepting, I thought about the things I'd like to learn from that design process and how to cater my designs to a broader audience. I decided that the best way to gather this kind of data would be to create a questionnaire for people to fill anonymously.

I looked through my concepts and after determining what drew me to designing the characters how I did, I began considering questions that I could ask. I did this by jotting ideas down on Post-It notes.

Questions on Post-It notes, before they were arranged into the order I wanted to ask them

I arranged these notes into the order I wanted to ask the questions so that I could check they flowed properly before I created the questionnaire. Originally, my intention had been to print the questionnaire and hand it around to other MA students. I decided against this because it limited my demographic to others studying the same course as me (which could have given me inaccurate or limited feedback on my questions) and it would also have been costly.

Instead, I opted to create a digital document that I could forward through social media and email, this meant I could ask a wider range of people and get more detailed feedback.

I tried to write my questions in a way that I could accommodate to people that might not have insight on games and gaming culture. I included a definition of a "mascot character" and the way I've related that to game characters. Before publishing the questionnaire publicly, I sent it to a couple of people to make sure the questions, formatting and context all made sense.

I've started sending the questionnaire out to people today, I'll be recording all the feedback I get from it in around a week's time. This gives time for plenty of people to answer the questions, to check back with me if they're struggling to understand something and to accommodate for people who might be busy with 9-5 jobs or other commitments to get around to answering the questionnaire.