"Too-hard basket"

G'day:

Update:
This survey is now complete. The results can be found here.

Yesterday I nudged my readers about the survey I'm doing about CFScript improvements in CF11.  I had some feedback overnight from Charlie (in the comments below) and another person saying much the same thing: the survey is a bit hard to fill out.  Indeed the anonymous comment in the survey answers was precisely:

God that was hard to complete. You should have grouped tags from the same family into one. e.g. all the cfform tags as 1 option.

My initial - somewhat uncharitable - reaction to that was that you must really lead a very charmed and effortless life if spending about 5min clicking 80-odd radio buttons constitutes "hard".  That said, I fully accept it might qualify as being consigned to the "too-hard" basket, which is fair enough. But it's not hard.

The relevant bit of Charlie's comment was:

[...] Also, I think you could have helped make it easier if you'd grouped related tags (especially ones that are subtags to another). That's a long survey. if you'd put related ones together, it might cut it in half (too late now, of course). [...]

So there's a common thread there, and this is a valid point: if I re-organised the list so that like-themed-tags were grouped, it would make the thing slightly less arduous. It'd be the same number of questions, but it would probably mean the brain only needs to engage once per category, rather than once per question.

In that light, I've re-done the survey, and the new one is here.  I have done two things:

1. Categorised the tags where possible, the categories being:
   • Form management tags
   • Page layout tags
   • UI element tags
   • Document manipulation/creation tags
   • External system integration tags
   • Security tags
   • Other miscellaneous tags
2. Added another option to each category which is a blanket answer for all the tags in that category.  IE: if you think all form manipulation tags are a "1 - Should not be implemented in CFScript", then there's one radio button to cover that, instead of one per tag.  I only have a free account for Survey Monkey, so I can't do branching logic on the answers, so it's possible to select that option and still select options for the individual tags too, but so be it.

Hopefully this makes the thing easier to fill out.

Now: if you've done the previous survey (which I will now switch off), please don't do this one. I don't want duplicate answers.

But please do have a look at it if your impression of the first version of it was "it's too hard".  Maybe it still is too hard? Oh well: bad luck, I guess (for both you and me).

As a footnote. One other thing Charlie said in his comment was:

Adam, I think part of the problem is that some of your readers may not use (or rarely use) CFSCRIPT, so they just don't have an opinion. :-)

This too is a good point. And will be the topic of an article I am drafting in my head.  Similar to the one about trailing slashes in tags from the other day... ;-)

Thanks for your help (and cheers for taking the time to feedback and make good suggestions, Charlie).

Righto.

--
Adam