I am really pleased with the level of participation we received in our recent site survey. There were over fifty full submissions in less than 24 hours. The feedback provided by those who kindly gave us a few minutes of their time will be put to good use to improve our future offerings.
It feels strange to have had to ask in this way as readers are happy to comment on Game Maker, Game Maker games, and the Game Maker websites and media publications we cover but we rarely get to hear your opinions on the site itself.
Below is a summary of the results:
- Opinion was split pretty evenly on whether we should add more game reviews and interviews.
- The vast majority of you (~90%) wanted to see more technical items.
- Two thirds of you thought more posts would be good but only 10% wanted “lots more”.
- I was pleasantly surprised with the ratings for trustworthiness, speed of coverage, breaking stores and quality of articles.
- 90% of you knew that GMTalk existed but less than a quarter of respondents had listened to it.
Should we have more game reviews?
Would you be interested in more technical items?
Do you want more interviews?
What do you think about the frequency of posts?
Perhaps the most insightful feedback came in the form of the textual responses received to the last two questions in the survey.
There were several mentions of the general blandness of the site’s design with people wanting to see more colourful pages. We also got useful suggestions on the types of content people want to see covered – these ranged from a request for “more opinion pieces to provoke debate about Game Maker, and it’s community” to in-depth analytics of trends in stories and graphs, for in-depth technical articles and reviews of tutorials and for more content that is unique to the site and cannot be found elsewhere.
Although in general the feedback was overwhelmingly positive the sheer range of suggested improvements and topics to cover bought home to me that however hard we try we will not be able to please everyone and indeed that it would be foolish to try to do so.
In an ideal world we would cover everything submitted but it isn’t practical both in the amount of time it would take us to research and present such materials and the demands it would place on you if you wanted to read it all!
We will work on incorporating many of the things you wanted to see over the next few months. You have have already noticed that we know allow you to make ‘nested’ comments in response to a message left by another visitor and the nature of the recent post comparing the Game Maker radio shows partly came about as a respondent said they enjoyed such articles.
Several of you asked if I would make a copy of the results available publicly. Here is a copy of the data with the names removed and some comments I made in response to suggestions.
Looking back at this post I do hope we don’t have too many colour-blind readers.
Oh yeah… *slaps self*
Well, considering the article says that ~90% wanted more technical items, and green is the largest portion of that graph, I’d say green is the people who voted in favor.
Is green the selected part or the blank part?
“Looking back at this post I do hope we don’t have too many colour-blind readers.”
I smell a technical article waiting to be written.
“more opinion pieces to provoke debate about Game Maker, and it’s community”
That was me 🙂