When creating a new product business case and to determine the forecast demand would surveys be useful?

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Question: When creating a new product business case and to determine the forecast demand would surveys be useful?

Foremost among company data sources are various types of market intelligence, such as survey information

Market survey data are primarily obtained to aid in product promotion and new product introduction decisions.

market survey data, because they are intended primarily for marketing purposes, must be viewed carefully in making production decisions

a survey that establishes an intent to increase purchases may

BASIC FORECASTING TECHNIQUES - this category are market research (surveys), Delphi (panel consensus), historical

An Overview: PRODUCT FORECASTING - Your ANSWER will be within this site - the above or portions of this web site - http://www.mcts.com/Product-Forecasting.html

This site will also be extremely useful to you - http://www.ameinfo.com/28120.html

Surveys

Survey research is one of the most important areas of measurement in applied social research. The dictionary meaning of survey is: "Survey is a technique for gathering information from a large number of users" A "survey" can be anything from a short paper-and-pencil feedback form to an intensive interview.

Surveys are an important technique used in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research. They provide feedback from the point of view of the users. They provide information regarding users' preferences and ideas about the design in many stages of the interface development. Users' reactions can have a strong impact on the design and development of an interface. However, not all surveys are useful. The data collected in a survey can be biased. This means that the answers to some kinds of questions - for instance, those related with time measurements or frequency of event occurrences - may not be reliable.

In general, the steps in designing and conducting a survey can be listed as follows
? Set the goals - What do you want to capture?
? Decide on the target population and sample size - Who will you ask?
? Determine the questions- What will you ask?
? Pre-test the survey - Test the questions
? Conduct the survey - Ask the questions
Analyze the data collected - Produce the report

The key step in designing a survey is setting the goals. The goals of the survey determine the target population and questions. If the goals are not clear, the result of the survey will be uncertain. Correctly determining the target population is critical; it should represent the targeted users of the interface and bias should be eliminated. This concept is known as sampling. Sampling is defined as "the act, process, or technique of selecting
a representative part of a population for the purpose of determining parameters or characteristics of the whole population" in Sampling In Research, which is a web tutorial on the subject by Mugo Fridah W.

In determining the questions, there are issues that must be considered such as type of questions, question contents, response format, question wordings, and question placing [Trochim, 2000]. The following paragraphs explain these issues briefly.
Researchers use three types of questions in surveys, namely multiple choices, numeric open-end (e.g., on the average, how much time do you spend per day on this system?) and text open-end (e.g. please give your comments about ...) [Trochim, 2000].

Mainly, there are two types of response format: structured response and unstructured response [Trochim, 2000]. Structured responses are very easy to be answered by the respondents but might not capture everything in the respondents' mind(s) (e.g. responses to multiple-choice questions). In unstructured responses, the respondents write down text as a response (e.g. responses to text open end questions). Questions should be clear and unambiguous. Also, the order of the questions matters. For example, the easier questions should be placed before the harder questions. The rationale behind this is to prevent respondent boredom at the beginning and to motivate them to complete the survey.

Researchers should prepare the questions and answer choices with a statistical method in mind, because they will be used to analyze the collected data at the end. However, not all the statistical methods might be applicable for a particular response type. For example, there is no statistical method that can analyze text open-end questions. There is a huge amount of literature regarding statistical data analysis. For example, a Summary of Survey Analysis Software is provided by Survey Research Methods Sections (SRMS) of the American Statistical Association (ASA). Some useful links on statistical methods are "Statistical Data Analysis: Inferring from Data" and "Research Methods & Statistics Resources".

Researchers should test the questions on a small sample of users, and they should also analyze the collected data with the planned statistical methods before the survey is conducted on a large scale. This gives the researcher a last chance to address possible problems. A survey can be created and ...