If I understand correctly, your product helps people keep track of what's going in the development of a project.
That may be even more susceptible to lying in surveys. First of all, people don't want to admit that they don't know things, especially things directly related to their job. I would have a hard time admitting I had no idea what was going on with a project I was working on [of course, I'm the only developer where I work, so that's not usually an issue ;)]. Also, those frustrated by not knowing what was going on are likely to exaggerate the impact of that lack of knowledge ("I couldn't do anything at all for 3 weeks!" or something like that).
This is a case where I think the best selling points may be testimonials from previous customers. Another thing you might consider is offering an audit service to evaluate how much time you think your product could save.
I'm not trying to discourage by any means, but surveys are hard to do right, so I'm just trying to suggest other options that you can use to supplement and strengthen the results of whatever survey you end up doing.
For me, my likelihood of doing a survey is [assuming I'm not unintentionally lying too much ;)] based more on the quality of the survey and how much I care about the product/process I am being surveyed about. I would be more than happy to take an interesting survey about Web.py (a Python web development framework).
The problem is most surveys are neither interesting nor about interesting things. If your survey involves rating statements Disagree Strongly, Disagree, Neither Agree Nor Disagree, Agree, Agree Strongly, you've already failed... epically. If your survey involves rating a long list of things on a scale of 1-10, you've failed epically. In fact, if your survey involves answering a long series of similar questions of ANY kind, you've failed epically. When I see a survey like that, I go into 5 mode (or 3 mode if it's 1-5). The answers are meaningless after about the 3rd question, and I'm not convinced that people can rate things at the granularity level of a 1-10 scale anyway. If you must have a scale, use 1-4. It's impossible to answer a middle meaningless answer and it's small enough that the answers may be accurate (what's really the difference between a 6 and a 7 or a 2 and a 3 on a 1-10 scale?).
Surveys should be dynamic and look like they were actually written by people, not machines. Ask questions in different ways. Ask open questions and give plenty of room to answer. Don't try to limit answers to an unreasonable set of options. Don't ask too many questions (I think about 20 should be considered the limit).
That may be even more susceptible to lying in surveys. First of all, people don't want to admit that they don't know things, especially things directly related to their job. I would have a hard time admitting I had no idea what was going on with a project I was working on [of course, I'm the only developer where I work, so that's not usually an issue ;)]. Also, those frustrated by not knowing what was going on are likely to exaggerate the impact of that lack of knowledge ("I couldn't do anything at all for 3 weeks!" or something like that).
This is a case where I think the best selling points may be testimonials from previous customers. Another thing you might consider is offering an audit service to evaluate how much time you think your product could save.
I'm not trying to discourage by any means, but surveys are hard to do right, so I'm just trying to suggest other options that you can use to supplement and strengthen the results of whatever survey you end up doing.
For me, my likelihood of doing a survey is [assuming I'm not unintentionally lying too much ;)] based more on the quality of the survey and how much I care about the product/process I am being surveyed about. I would be more than happy to take an interesting survey about Web.py (a Python web development framework).
The problem is most surveys are neither interesting nor about interesting things. If your survey involves rating statements Disagree Strongly, Disagree, Neither Agree Nor Disagree, Agree, Agree Strongly, you've already failed... epically. If your survey involves rating a long list of things on a scale of 1-10, you've failed epically. In fact, if your survey involves answering a long series of similar questions of ANY kind, you've failed epically. When I see a survey like that, I go into 5 mode (or 3 mode if it's 1-5). The answers are meaningless after about the 3rd question, and I'm not convinced that people can rate things at the granularity level of a 1-10 scale anyway. If you must have a scale, use 1-4. It's impossible to answer a middle meaningless answer and it's small enough that the answers may be accurate (what's really the difference between a 6 and a 7 or a 2 and a 3 on a 1-10 scale?).
Surveys should be dynamic and look like they were actually written by people, not machines. Ask questions in different ways. Ask open questions and give plenty of room to answer. Don't try to limit answers to an unreasonable set of options. Don't ask too many questions (I think about 20 should be considered the limit).