Thesis project survey

Hello!

My partner and I are working on a sofa for our senior thesis project. We would greatly appreciate if you could take this survey to help with our research!

link to survey: Sofa Thesis Project Survey #2

thank you so much!

It honestly sounds like a survey that was made after you already made up your mind what your project will look like. Lots of leading questions :wink: Rule of thumb: If I read your survey and already exactely know what you WANT to hear it’s probably not a very well thought out survey.

Good on you guys for getting a survey out there. I think a few of the questions could be worded a bit more neutrally. Also, in the price brackets, I’d ad more. Couches get really expensive.

I think you could add a few questions around moving (can things be semi taken apart, one of the biggest challenged of moving couches is getting them in and out of homes). You could also ask more about the kind of environments they are in (home, apartment, condo… urban, suburban, urban, rural… colonial, Edwardian, Spanish revival, modern, mid century, modernist…). I’d also ask more about setting (living room, sitting room, family room) and household occupants (single, couple, children, extended family)

I’d recommend you circulate this survey only to people who are:

  1. not designers
  2. over 30 years old

Feel free to use these boards as a sounding board. Instead of posting a finished survey and getting 20 designers to take it, use the discussion forums to work out the survey itself.

Confused about the summary and the survey.
-“high quality sofa that is designed to last a lifetime and beyond.”
-“flexible lifestyle of young professionals in a way that does not compromise the lifespan of the couch.”

Your summary makes me believe that you are designing a sofa for 25+ working professionals. High quality that lasts a life time means (to me) that it will be an “expensive” quality couch. 2K, 3K and up. One feature is that it is easy to move (from apartment to apartment).

Yet your summary leads me to believe that you are designing a couch for college students. I highly doubt that young professionals still have or will keep their college couch for a lifetime…and beyond.

Agree with MROG. Sounds like you are looking for answers to support your hypothesis.
I would suggest you start with a problem statement. Do you have a couch? Is there an ideal couch you would like? What’s wrong with college couches and can you find that ideal couch? Have you done any market research to evaluate and compare materials/cost/retail availability/shipping problems/sizes, etc.

Take a step back and re-address your problem statement. Good luck.

I don’t know if the survey has changed from when I took it to when the folks above me took it, but I really don’t see any issues with the survey itself.

Different surveys serve different purposes. An exploratory survey is entirely different from from a confirmatory survey. Seems to me the survey I took was the latter and everyone above was expecting the former. Yes, you may have some very specific ideas, but do people agree with them or not is a step that cannot be eliminated. Not all surveys are for generating ideas.