Star-spangled

Five stars aren’t always undeserved. The conference and exhibition today in one of the highest rated hotels in Karachi was a good indication of how my humble flat (complete with laundry lying around) is at least seven stars in comparison. I do keep my bathroom clean, even if it is isn’t sparkling. And going into the dining room doesn’t involve squeezing through a back-access corridor from the twilight zone. I’m not expecting exotic luxuries that stimulate the senses, though a projection screen that doesn’t give you a headache and a microphone that works during a key speech would be more preferrable. But a traditionally dressed doorman does pull the handle for you if you’re nice.

In development

A huge progressive organization I‘m familiar with obviously does an online survey like it was just invented. I was to ensure a high response rate by positive user interaction, so I may be biased when I say that part went right – 2,500 completed surveys in 6 weeks. Analyzing more than 60,000 records dumped in an excel spreadsheet, here are a bunch of lessons learned about doing an online survey from Pakistan:

1. Don’t expect your developer to do anything more than code your survey. If you’re thinking about having the information neatly handed over to you in a report (or at least having categorized responses), then you should have listed it in your initial requirements. Because chances are he (in some cases, she) didn’t know you were actually planning on analyzing, he/ she probably thought it was just another one of those mindless instructions that loses its intended purpose once it’s trickled down the various layers of management.
2. Try your best to leave out the ‘Other’ option. This is usually seen as a wonderful opportunity for the majority of Pakistanis to express their creativity, bad English, limited intelligence in understanding how surveys work and aversion towards reading through the list of options and clicking the option they’ve so elaborately misspelled. Incase you need to have it in there, try to make sure the response is standardized in some way or you’ll find a minimum 449 different responses instead of the 6 you expect.
3. Make sure you questions are extremely simple to understand. Some examples of answers to the question ‘Which new services would you like to see offered in Pakistan?’ are “I like to see big services” and “I can’t understand what it means”. Maybe I should have been curt and simply asked “Which new services you want?”

However, I did have a good working relationship with the developer and pivot tables can make up for system generated responses, so it wasn’t entirely unworkable. However, I think developers should be more business-minded and take the time to think about what end-users want, even if they don’t specify it, instead of being fed instructions like a robot. Maybe I’m wrong, but I sure need a better approach next time around.

With the lights out, its less dangerous

It’s our fault really. I mean having to make a couple of updates on our national identity card has caused everyone so much trouble. And just when we’ve decided that things are going smoothly today, the lights go out. As we retire back to the waiting bench and the NADRA center staff gets out the snacks and assumes their daily lights-gone party huddle, no body’s complaining. Nobody’s complaining that the center should get a power generator. Nobody’s complaining that there a million things that they’d rather be doing than sitting in the dark fanning themselves till the lights come back on two hours later. Everybody’s sitting patiently, waiting, even appreciatively, including my wife and I. That’s because the not-so-distant-past had dark stinking dilapidated buildings with red-stains in every corner from tobacco spit, and crabby officials who’d like to make it as hard for you as possible so they could earn a bribe. Now at least the surroundings were clean and computers did most of the administrative work instead of runners fetching and filing dusty papers. We even spent some quality time having a conversation till the lights came back on.