LIG language survey requirements
- Inigo Sesar
Goals
- The main goal of this functionality is to provide a flexible tool to design and implement a (language) survey, reaching all registered AEGEE members.
- The main goal of the language survey is to assess the language skills, needs and attitudes of AEGEE members towards languages.
- Collect, store and process the responses of many members automatically.
Background and strategic fit
It has been more than a year since the Language Interest Group showed their plan to make a survey about languages in AEGEE. However, answering simple questions such as which are the most spoken languages in AEGEE or how do people learn languages is not an easy task, especially if we want to give an answer with a high confidence and a small error. Having thousands of registered members means that we need a large sample, in order to generalize some results to the whole Network. Nevertheless, it is very difficult to get thousands of answers or even reach all AEGEE members by sharing a link to an external form in a Facebook group or a mailing list. However, more members would probably complete and submit a short form, if they saw a notification when they log into their AEGEE intranet account. In addition, most external platforms used to create online forms are very limited and not appropriate to handle thousands of answers. For example, it is not possible to create a dynamic form with Google Forms, so that some questions will only show up if the user selects some answers to previous questions, and there is no option to allow the user, who is filling in the form, to decide whether (s)he wants the answers to be anonymous.
Although it will be designed according to the needs of the Language Interest Group, this functionality could also be useful for other European Bodies. The results of flexible and personalized surveys could be useful to assess the needs and interests of our members and improve AEGEE events and projects. It would also be useful to know where we have to focus, share best practices, prevent unsuccessful initiatives or make future predictions.
Assumptions
- Every member of the organization has a linked object in the system.
- The database of the system already has some basic information about each member (e.g. name, antenna, city, gender, studies, etc.)
Requirements
| # | Title | User Story | Importance | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Standardized Microservice | This microservice must meet minimum standardized microservice requirements and be able to communicate with other microservices. | Must Have | |
| 2 | Controls | It must be able to include the following controls, which a form might contain: short text, paragraph text, checkboxes, multiple choices, dropdown menus and scales (for evaluations). | Must Have |
|
| 3 | Required answer | The person who creates a form can decide whether an answer to a question is required. | Must Have | |
| 4 | Communication | It must be able to read some data from other microservices, such as the name and gender of the person who is filling in the form. | Must Have | |
| 5 | Storing and exporting data | Data should be stored in the server and easily exported to a binary file, which can be downloaded from the server. | Must Have | |
| 6 | Notifications | The users, who have not submitted the form, should be notified when they log in to the system. | Must Have | |
| 7 | Start and end | The form will be active during the specified period. After this time, no more notifications will appear and no more responses will be accepted. | Must Have | |
| 8 | Editing permissions | Only some members will be able to edit the form and download results. | Must Have | |
| 9 | Dynamic questions | Some questions will appear depending on the answer to previous questions. | Medium | |
| 10 | Anonymous results | The user can decide whether his/her answers will be public or anonymous. | Medium | |
| 11 | Edit submitted responses | The person who creates the form might decide to allow users editing responses of an already submitted form. | Low | |
| 12 | Image | The form might show an image or picture to make it more attractive. | Low |
User interaction and design
The form should have at least a title, the list of questions and the submit response button.
Questions
Below is a list of questions to be addressed as a result of this requirements document:
| Question | Outcome |
|---|---|
| How can we get a large number of answers? Would a notification during sign up be sufficient? | |
Should we include one or a few fields about languages in the general database of the CORE microservice, or should we ask all questions about languages in another form, using this microservice? | |
Is it better to do a two-stage research or wait until this microservice is ready? |