Amazon's surveys

Interviews are the ground work for doing surveys. This is the second round of interviews we are doing regarding Drupal administration. The first set of interviews were done over a year ago and led to the first Drupal administration survey with some 900 survey responses.

It was requested that the full details of the survey preparation be made available and so I am posting here. Here is the summary I posted to the Drupal developers list:

I conducted 5 interviews today and began the process of summarizing the findings leading to a Drupal administration survey. My hope is to do 4 more interviews tomorrow and collect interview notes from Dries and Steven Peck. I'll then put out a draft survey for comments and deploy on the home page of Drupal.org ASAP.

Summary:
Usage of Drupal
Daily for 30-60 minutes of website management
Daily for several hours in site development and deployment

Motivations for using Drupal
Speed of feature and requirements deployment is critical to choosing Drupal
Quality of people, their contributions, helpfulness, and community building domain knowledge is critical to choosing Drupal
Drupal website end users benefit from fast feature deployment and Drupal feature innovation

Tasks-Drupal software
Logging to identify the state of the web site as well as events that indicate upcoming website issues are critical.
Managing users, content, and spam are top activities for administrators. Better contextual interfaces are need to manage this. e.g. Banning, un-publishing should be beside username or content not in administer >> somewhere
Discovery of administration settings is hard. Grouping settings into situational use is important. Situations include: site building, new feature testing and deployment, and ongoing maintenance
User interfaces for large scale management of Drupal (blocks, menus, content, categories, users) do not scale adequately. e.g. interface assume individual changes and not bulk changes of hundreds of items.

Tasks-Drupal processes
Testing features and getting feedback from site users is an important activity. e.g. provide testing role with feedback block for that role
Process of discovering features, downloading, installing, configuring, testing, filing issues, working with developers, evaluating, and abandoning broken modules is a major cost associated with administering Drupal
Integrating features(module X and module Y) produces errors and makes theming hard. Despite difficulties it is a net positive.
Upgrading and versioning Drupal and the ability to make informed decisions about this process is currently inadequate.

Here is table collecting responses from the interviews: http://drupal.org/node/77193

Interview 1: http://groups.drupal.org/node/1136
Interview 2: http://groups.drupal.org/node/1135
Interview 3: http://groups.drupal.org/node/1133
Interview 4: http://groups.drupal.org/node/1137
Interview 5: http://groups.drupal.org/node/1134

To seek, to strive, to find, and not to yield

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