I've been thinking so much about this problem. some number of months or years from now when I make the hmsmgat3 survey, it will be a problem that a certain percentage of people will not read the instructions. and I need to do what I can to minimize that percentage.
and like what I believe is a major source of the problem is that many people stop reading instructions as soon as they think they know what's expected of them. and I'm not actually sure a video would help very much!
would someone in the 45% "oh we're making a bell curve okay I can skip the short paragraph directly above the poll then that surely won't contain any relevant information" demographic watch an entire video just so they know what format I expect for a survey question, or would they watch enough of the video to get to the point where they think they know what's expected of them and then fill out the survey incorrectly?
how do I convey how extremely important it is to actually read and follow the instructions without coming across as condescending or scaring people away with how many paragraphs they have to read?
I guess I have some time to figure this stuff out. but this is such a hard problem
like, okay. here's the specific tangible problem I have.
I want to eventually make a survey where people tell me directly in an open answer question what games they think the mainline super mario series consists of. to get useful data out of that, I need the answers to be well formatted.
specifically, I need it to be obvious and unignorable that:
I expect the items of the list to be separated by line breaks, not commas (some video game titles have commas in them so I can't automate the process of turning their list into data if they use commas)
the participant should not write anything in their response that is not part of their list
neither of these are things that are impossible to fix if someone doesn't follow the instructions, but they can't be fixed automatically. I'd need to manually clean up the responses or pay someone else to do it or (worst option!) cross my fingers and hope google gemini isn't hallucinating if I give it my data to clean up.
and if it's a survey that gets thousands of responses, 5% of people missing the instructions is still potentially hundreds of responses I need to either clean up or discard. and yes I would rather clean them up than discard them
I feel like this is very difficult to solve using a plain text entry format, and is better suited to a list creation format where the user has to press a plus button to add a new entry. Then you could also do autocomplete on the game names which would help with deduplication.
Other than that your best shout is probably checking that the user understands the rules before allowing them to start answering, like having a 'list all the days of the week' question before the main one where they can't proceed until they've put it in in the right format.
