Threaded Conversation Survey

Hello, and thank you for coming by. No personal information will be collected here. I'd just like to know what you think about a new way of displaying conversations, which I'll show you in a moment.

The following questions concern the python-dev discussion group.

  1. About how long have you been reading this group?

     less than 1 month
     1 month to 6 months
     6 months to a year
     1 to 5 years
     5 to 10 years
     more than 10 years

  2. About how long have you used online discussion groups of any kind?

     less than 1 month
     1 month to 6 months
     6 months to a year
     1 to 5 years
     5 to 10 years
     more than 10 years

  3. What program or service do you usually use to read incoming new messages in this group? (For example, your e-mail program, newsreader, or website where you read these messages.)

  4. What program or service do you usually use to review past messages in this group? (This could be the same answer or a different answer from the previous question.)

  5. How often do you read new messages in this group?

     less than once a month, or never
     once every few weeks or month
     about once a week
     a few times a week
     about once a day
     a few times a day

  6. How often do you go back to look at past messages?

     less than once a month, or never
     once every few weeks or month
     about once a week
     a few times a week
     about once a day
     a few times a day

Now I'm going to ask you to look at a "threadmap" that shows all the messages in the recent conversation about Unicode byte order marks. (I just copied these messages from the public discussion group and arranged them into a webpage.)

In the threadmap, the responses to each message are arranged in blocks of text below the message, forming a tree. When the blocks become too small to contain text, their content is not shown. Clicking on the blue first sentence of a block zooms in to a view where that block is shown at the top, allowing you to see its replies in more detail. When the mouse pointer passes over a reply that quoted part of its parent, the quoted part is highlighted in the parent block.

Click here to see the threadmap in a new window. Please explore the threadmap and compare how you would read a conversation this way to your usual way. Then rate your level of agreement with each of the following statements.

Statement Strongly
Disagree		 Disagree Neutral Agree Strongly
Agree
The threadmap helps me understand the conversation.
The threadmap is easy to navigate.
For reading a currently ongoing conversation, I would prefer to use the threadmap method over my current method.
For reviewing a past conversation, I would prefer to use the threadmap method over my current method.
If the threadmap were always available, I would probably look at past conversations more often.

Please use the space below to describe the reasons for the preferences you just indicated. What did you like or dislike about the threadmap, and how would it affect the way you participate in this group? Feel free to write as much as you like to help me understand your thoughts about the threadmap.

Any questions about this survey? Contact me at <pingzesty.ca>.