Challenge

In Fall of 2022, my head of product at Docker asked me to create a developer survey to help us understand the State of Application Development with regard to Docker.  The ask was to create a survey for external developers to understand their current usage, their needs, their wants and most specifically, their pain points as a way to find new ideas and opportunities for Docker in the future.

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Method

My initial start with this project was to review and consolidate all of the other developer surveys that I could find, from StackOverflow, to Github, GitLab, Digital Ocean and others.  While they each had a separate focus, I did pull from those some common background questions so that I could ensure that our sample was representative. 

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I then did internal interviews to find out what our product team wanted to know about developers and what would help them in their planning for the next fiscal year.  I started development of the survey and brought in PM, Engineering and Design representatives to review and comment.  After multiple review cycles, I developed the survey in our survey tool.  Along with some of my colleagues, we tested the survey multiple times.  

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I established a budget for giveaways and worked with Legal to ensure we applied the rules correctly  I worked with Marketing to publicize the survey when I was ready to go.  I launched the survey 6 weeks after starting the development.  Since I was the only UX Researcher, I also had to conduct all of the recruiting and outreach, as well as paying out the prizes.

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Once we hit our target of one month, we had over 1400 responses.  I worked with a data analyst on the model for the data and getting it into Looker so that we could easily disseminate the results to the product teams.  I presented to the product teams and created separate team Looker pages to highlight the issues most relevant to them.

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Impact

This project provided unique insights into pain points and opportunities for Docker development in the future.  Some of the findings have been used in new features and in prioritizing development projects.​

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Research Highlights:

• Survey development

• Guerilla recruiting

• Data analysis

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