Primary research: Questionnaire Planning

During our art portfolio class, we were introduced to primary and secondary research. 

I am planning in the future to also create a blog post with primary research of me going around the city and taking pictures of different lamp, however, as of now I decided to create a questionnaire and send it out to people.

My aim for this questionnaire:

-To discover what interest the people.

-To see if my designs would be successful in the market.

I sent it out to many age groups in order to receive feedback from different age categories. I wanted to see the different opinions of different people. These questions would help me develop my project and understand what I need to do in the next weeks. 

Primary research is always very important for designers. 

This was my questionnaire:

The first step was to customise my layout. I added the title 'Lamp designs' so that the respondent knows what this is about. I also added a picture of cavemen so that they can immediately connect it to the theme of the questionnaire. I briefly added a description of what the questionnaire will be about.

These questions are demographic questions. They will help me identify what part of the target market is responding to my questions and will allow me to form patterns and links to the rest of the questions.

For the age question, I specifically added those options as my target market is roughly 20-35 year olds.

This question will help me understand the percentage of my target market which is interested. However, this question can be misleading. I will be adding modern twists to my designs so they will not resemble exactly the Stone era, just the inspiration behind it.

I will be designing a collection of 5 different lamps. This question will help me determine which type of lamp interests my audience the most.

For this question, I had to add an introductory sentence. Why? Cause these materials are unusual for lamps. Therefore, I wanted to ensure that the respondent would link the stone age with the materials used in order to avoid all the responses being 'none'.

This is an important question for me. It will help determine the shape of the actual products. I had to include many options, and also the 'other' option so that people can have enough choices to select from.

I noticed that my questionnaire layout was getting very similar. I had many questions with multiple answers which could be boring to the user. Therefore, I also added a scalar question to make it more interesting. 

This question will help me determine the desired price point for each lamp.

This question will help me determine the desired colour for the lamps.

This was another important question in the questionnaire. I added drop down boxes so the respondent can have many options to choose from.

This will help me determine which are the most important features in a lamp design.

The last three questions were preference questions. This would help me realise what the user prefers. With the responses in these questions, I would understand what my target market is looking for in terms of aesthetics and functionality. 

This is the link to my questionnaire: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfQTTSc4bNO37ZqOLaFuxACfGGJTEDpv9dSNrIz_IRb4ulNNQ/viewform?usp=sf_link 

Conclusion: I think that primary research is an extremely vital step in all designs. I am now planning on sending this questionnaire out and wait for answers. I am happy with the questions I came up with and I think that they will be a beneficial impact to my designs. 

I think that I may complete another questionnaire further in the term to ask more specific and detailed questions.