Sarna 2014 Survey Results
Hi everyone!
I want to thank everyone that took the Sarna 2014 Survey. We had 941 responses, which has given us a ton of great feedback! Besides the survey questions, there were several hundred written suggestions, ideas, bugs and thoughts on how to improve the site.
I’ve spent the last day pouring over the results, and have tried to boil everyone’s responses down to some key takeaways. Over the new few months I’ll be addressing your biggest concerns and best suggestions.
You can check out the survey results here.
Here are some of the more interesting results:
Demographics
Sarna is:
Age-wise:
- 87.58% are between 18 and 44 years
- The largest group is 25 to 34 years (43%)
Sarna Interaction
What people do on Sarna:
- 97% read/edit the wiki
- 20% read the news
Only 13% have edited a wiki page. But it’s so easy!
53% have never read the news. Check it out! Our writers have been covering a lot of great BattleTech and community news.
Experience
94% think the overall experience is Good/Great.
78% think the site is Fast/Very Fast. Only 2.5% think Slow/Very Slow.
82% think the site’s design is Good/Great. 1% think it’s Poor/Terrible.
82% think it’s Easy/Very Easy to find information on Sarna, only 1.5% think it’s Difficult/Very Difficult.
76% are indifferent to the ads (and 15% use an ad-blocker).
Areas to Improve
Here are some of the key areas people think Sarna can improve, with the most popular requests first:
- Mobile search box should be moved to the top of the page.
- Better search: Search doesn’t find similar words or misspellings. Search order isn’t the smartest. Basically, people often use Google to search the site.
- I will switch the site to use Sphinx Search which is a lot smarter than the built-in MediaWiki search.
- Faster search: Searching for terms that aren’t article names is slow.
- I will switch the site to use Sphinx Search which is a lot faster than the built-in MediaWiki search.
- Mobile design and layout needs improvement.
- The mobile site was removed earlier this year in favor of a “responsive design”, which should look good on all layouts (desktop, tablet and phone).
- It’s still a work-in-progress, and I will be working on improving it further this year.
- Wiki grammar / spelling could be improved on many pages.
- I will make it easy for visitors to suggest pages that need grammar or spelling fixes.
- Sarna is a wiki! Please help out by making edits as well! You can do this without even logging in.
- More pictures on the wiki.
- Sarna is a wiki! Feel free to submit as many pictures as you want (within policy guidelines!
- General site performance could be improved.
- I’m always looking to improve the site’s performance and will be making some additional changes to make it faster for everyone.
- The Downloads section could be updated, better organized and improved.
- This is a constant work-in-progress, and would love it if anyone would be willing to help. Please contact me if you’re interested.
- Reorganize and simplify the left bar.
- We’ll take a look at making it easier to navigate.
- A fan-fiction section.
- Planetary maps could be improved
- This is being handled as part of the Project: Planets effort, and they could use your help!
- Offline wiki download
- I looked into this a few years back and couldn’t find anything then. I was hoping to be able to “build” the site into a mobile/offline app.
All in all, great suggestions! I hope to work on many of these over the coming months.
Thanks for all of your input and ideas. Please leave any additional ones here. It was great hearing an overwhelming amount of positive feedback on how much you like and use the site. Glad to be of service!
And thanks to everyone who’s ever helped out on Sarna — wiki admins, editors, file contributors, forum participants, news writers and readers. It’s a great community!