WSGF Nov 2012 Survey Results

The WSGF recently posted a site survey, to help direct us as we move the site forward in our 10th year. I want to thank everyone who took the survey, the response was more than what I had anticipated and am grateful for everyone who took the time to give us their opinions. With just a week of being live, the survey has collected 250 completions. Again, I am surprised at how quickly we amassed these results, and I am very grateful.

I thought I would share the results here, and provide some of my thoughts as well. Additionally, we've posted a short follow-up survey, to ask some questions we forgot and get a few more bits of info. You can click on any graph to embiggen it.

Visiting Habits

Almost half of the respondents visit at least once a week, but over one third only visit the site when they need info on a specific game. It is nice to see that almost half of the people who took the survey make a point to visit the site on a regular basis, and even 14% of those who answered were first time users. It's nice to see that we have a sizable population of new users each month (and our web stats show that as well). The largest response was that users only visit when they need info on a game.

The WSGF may not ever be a "destination" site like HardOCP, but we would like to be as useful as possible and have more people visiting on a weekly basis. At the same time, we've got to make sure that we maintain our niche, and don't water down the site in an effort to attract a larger audience.

Looking at reasons behind visiting, almost 75% of people said their primary reason for visiting was to get info on a specific game. By more than a 2:1 margin, people are looking for info after they purchase a game. In looking at reasons why people don't visit more often, one-fifth said it was due to issues with the site speed. A similar number said that enough games simply supported widescreen (and possibly multi-monitor), and they didn't need to visit the site. Almost 25% said that they couldn't find what they were looking for.

With regards to the speed, our recent migration back to phpBB forums (as well as other tweaks) has resulted in very significant speed improvements. With regards to being able to find information, we have made the search options more prominent and labeled the individual searches for the site articles and the forum. We are always open to suggestions on how we could improve the site menu or layout, and encourage you to respond in the comments.

When we look at the "other" reasons why people don't visit more often, the biggest reasons are: lack of time (busy playing games), more games are supporting multi-monitor, the user only has a single widescreen (and only the rare game doesn't support widescreen), only visit when they need info on a specific game, and the lack of new information on the site.

Looking at the last two charts in this section, we see that more than 60% of the respondents already have a multi-monitor setup and almost 15% more want one. Additionally, more than half of those users now require the game to support their multi-monitor setup (either natively or by WSGF fix), before they will purchase said game.

Doing More; Doing It Better

One of the major things we wanted to find was, what do users want out of the site. What can we either do more of, or do better. The biggest thing that people want more of are Detailed Reports. The WSGF Staff and Insiders do a great job of producing the Detailed Reports we have, but any user can add games to the database. The process has been made much easier since the move to Drupal, and I think we need to do a better job with tutorials on how to add a game to the database. The amount of community involvement we have in this area will be directly proportional to the amount of new content.

Next in the list is more media-related entries (videos and screenshot galleries), and benchmarking. Skid's multi-monitor videos are quite popular, and are a feature unique to the WSGF. One thing we need to figure out is what benchmarking users want, and where we should focus our time and resources. This will be the bulk of our follow-up survey. Benchmarking is a time-consuming endeavor, and we can't afford to waste time producing content that people aren't looking for or can get elsewhere.

I do plan to get more consistent with a weekly newsletter, if only to point out new content in the other areas. Additionally, I am going to look at how I can do a video version of the newsletter, with a minimal amount of time investment. Video can be deceptively arduous, and a time consuming process. If we can get something short and sweet turned out quickly, that will be our goal.

Additionally, when we look at the display technology that interests people, we find moderate to strong interest almost across the board. Many users want to see additional developments and improvements in the existing Eyefinity and Surround ecosystems. There is also strong interest in gaming with 120Hz panels, 4k panels and 21:9 displays. We do have a 120Hz panel in-house and plan to do some articles on this topic. We also have one of the first Dell 21:9 panels scheduled to arrive the week of Thanksgiving, and we could begin to test 4k by setting up a 2x2 Eyefinity grid with 1080p panels. There is also decent interest in the Occulus Rift VR display, and the WSGF was a Kickstarter backer. We are scheduled to receive one of the December units.

Whether you like multi-monitor, higher FOV single panels (21:9 displays), high pixel density (4k panels), smoother displays (120Hz) or fully immersive VR displays - the WSGF plans to cover your interests and continue to serve you.

Finally, we asked an open-ended question on what we could do more of or do better. Out of the 250 completed surveys, we received almost 100 responses to this question. A few people said that we were doing great, and that they were overall happy with the site. Many people listed that they would like to see more games on the site. A general sentiment was to keep to our roots. Some of these responses are listed below:

A lot of the responses talked about the desire for more hardware benchmarks and testing.

Other people were looking for more interaction with and better promotion of the WSGF within the larger gaming communities.

And finally a number of people mentioned issues with the site speed and layout. The recent migration with the forums have enabled us to put in significant improvements to the site speed. As we do additional site updates (moving from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7), we are also looking to overhaul the look of the site. We are also planning some incremental improvements between now and then, and will be engaging the community on help with that.