What? You don’t believe me?
I got an email requesting me to participate in a survey for the Apple iTunes Music Store. There were very few demographic questions (age group and occupation are all I can recall), and questions with lots of checkboxes and radio buttons adjoining very long lists of things.
Then there’s the question that asks “approximately how many digital music files (or songs) are in your library on your computer.”
So I fired up my main iTunes library and looked. 11702 is what I typed in the box, and hit enter.
The page comes back to me, with a big red message: Please enter a number between 0 and 10000
Now, I don’t know much about survey design, but I figure that my library isn’t abnormally huge. Some people who use the iTMS must have similar amounts of music. Why didn’t they account for that? I mean, it’s not like 99999 takes up more space in a database than 10000.
So I dutifully entered what they told me to, so I could get to the next screen. And now what kind of survey results are they going to get? Well, in my case, incomplete ones. I clicked boxes and radio buttons until I got tired, and still saw no sign of the survey ending. Oh well.
[update, next day] Well, I did go back and finish it. But I was disappointed to find there was no payoff. Chintzy bastards.
