Anyway, back on topic..
I made a little community survey for /r/MechanicalKeyboards. Since I see many of you commenting there, I think it might be interesting for you to fill it out if you haven't noticed it already.
The purpose of this survey is to see how the community might have changed since previous polls. It is not my intention to gauge any market interest or product viability, though some of the data could be used for that. I just enjoying looking at graphs and charts.
First, everyone should note that self-selected surveys like this are usually extremely poor measures of real populations, because the self selection dramatically skews responses.
But anyway, there are some questions you could improve.
- you should break down ages more evenly and add more categories. You seem to be trying to make a distinction between high school and college students with the break at 18, but age isn’t the best proxy for that, and having different sized age buckets makes it needlessly difficult to compare ages. I think you should just do 5 year age buckets from 10 up to say 60, and then maybe have a catch-all beyond that.
- Asia is a pretty broad geographic category, including Israel, Indonesia, and North Korea. Might be interesting to break that into a few subcategories
- No BSD, etc.?
- Would be interesting to do a survey on typing technique a bit finer grained than 2 finger vs. touch typing vs. other. Probably going to take about 10–20 questions about it to get a decent summary of everyone’s different technique though.
- Preferred keyboard brand list doesn’t really include vintage stuff
- preferred layout should probably at least include japanese layout. “Ergonomic” is a pretty broad category, as is “custom”. Maybe those should have text fields.
- switch types question is super limited, with way too heavy an MX focus. Would be interesting to give people a list of maybe 40 types of switches, with options for “love it”, “like it”, “meh”, “hate it”, and “haven’t tried” (or similar) for each one. Seriously, not even a distinction between Model M & F, or a beam spring option? You’d get crucified at Deskthority.
- you might want to credit me in linking that keycap profile reference pic, or link the
geekhack thread about it. :-) also, the list of choices is pretty incomplete. Personally I’d break the question up into 3 questions: (1) how tall should keycaps be low/medium/high? (2) what top shape flat/spherical/cylindrical/other? (3) flat/sculpted caps/uniform caps with curved plate.
- whether someone should elevate their keyboard depends on desk height, so can’t be asked generically without knowing the context. also, your question doesn’t accommodate tented split keyboards, reverse slope keyboards, etc.
- would be nice when asking about palmrests to include chair elbow/armrests and forearms rests in the question. Might also be interesting to ask about preferred palmrest material.
- you should add a question about laptops and keyboard use, and another question about using keyboards on desk vs. lap.
