Survey

During the middle of January 2010, we ran a survey asking potential readers to help the Ubuntu Manual team create a better manual. We asked nine questions -- two multiple choice questions to establish information about the user, an open-text response, two matrix responses, two more multiple choice, another open-text response, and another multiple choice.

The survey, and the questions, are reproduced in the file at http://www.netapt.com/~ilyah/ubuntumanual/SurveyResults.zip

The results are as follows:

Respondent Audience

• We reached over 2,800 people, of whom over 1300 completed the survey.
• Almost two thirds of respondents are very heavy Ubuntu users; over 80% of respondents use the latest version
• Over half the users regularly use Windows XP; over a quarter use Windows 7; under 6% use the Mac OS X 10.6

Focus on applications

• OpenOffice should be explained in a lot of detail

• Tomboy should be explained in a brief mention
• Rhythmbox, F-Spot, Totem, and Empathy should be explained in slightly above average detail
• Firefox, Evolution, and Ubuntu One should be explained in significantly above average detail

Focus of hardware

• Wireless and networking deserves to be covered in a lot of detail
• Firewire does not need a lot of coverage
• Modems and USB drives need slighly above average detail
• Sound, Webcams, Displays, Printing, and Scanning need significant detail

Command line

• Not much consensus, but definitely at least some introductory covereage

Security

• Medium coverage about security, explaining both concepts and advanced tools

Printing

• Over a third of respondents would want to print the manual

Free form responses

• One general topic to be included in the manual
  • a lot of mentions of software installation
  • migration from, and coexistence with windows (shares, printers)
• One troubleshooting topic
  • drivers
  • sound
  • installing Ubuntu
  • program installation and updates

Correlations

• No strong correlations appear between users of Windows vs users of Ubuntu, nor between heavy users and non-users of Ubuntu

Conclusions

Some items here are surprising; users want more emphasis on Open Office and Firefox than seems necessary.

Users desire a lot of emphasis on some problematic categories of hardware, such as networking and other common peripherals.

Survey was not successful in reaching our target audience of mainly non-users of Ubuntu, and thus the results are biased by the respondents' large amount of existing experience with Ubuntu.

A large number of respondents were from non-English speaking countries, and may not have understood some of the instructions or provided sensible free form responses.

Actions

Our current approach is generally validated -- a manual does seem to be useful.

Authors should review the attached documents, and the results listed above, and potentially dedicate more or less resources to certain topics, as indicated by the respondents.