Responding in-line...

Flachland Tapir wrote:

I am trying to answer some severe critics from bryce and mental on my questionnaire:

Please don't take offense to their concerns/criticisms. They are honestly trying to offer a little advice as to how you could potentially improve the quality of your survey results (and obviously voice concerns about your intentions). Our community has a number of people in a variety of fields including a few scientific fields, so they may have something to say that's worth hearing.

1. For getting a larger sample size, be sure that I am posting my questionnaire not only on an Inkscape mailing list but also eg in an Adobe forum.

I wouldn't doubt it. You may also want to post in forums on sites such as DeviantART where it's an art community with a diverse userbase. There are plenty of professionals, hobbyists, and college students studying design on there to participate... plus they use all kinds of software for a bunch of different platforms. You could also post your survey on Digg as well to see if that might get more attention.

4. science is always distorted and subjective!

I don't personally agree with this having known many people in various scientific fields and knowing their methods and hearing many stories. I really think that GOOD scientists are objective, and good science doesn't have a particular agenda other than increasing our understanding of whatever was observed.

5. the questionnaire is only a part for verifying my thesis, I will also use other

research methods for getting answers.

Here's an idea to consider, if you have access to a laptop or something with both commercial and open source products installed to ask people with varying skill levels to try to accomplish a few tasks in each program. You could potentially get some fairly objective feedback.

-Josh