Audience Expectations - Questionnaire Conclusion

I created the following pie charts by utilising an online service - click here.

This blog post will house the full analysis of the questionnaire I produced. Its intention was to gather information regarding the expectations of music magazine audiences. I was focusing particularly on the genre of metal, and so the majority of the pick-and-choose options were metal-orientated. As usual, click the thumbnails to expand the image to a clear size.

The above image - once clicked - displays my findings in their entirety and will therefore be the base from which I make the following conclusions. For the interest of validity I have decided to declare the second answer in both cells E8 and F8 void; this is because I stated clearly that the participant of my questionnaire should choose just one answer, and their most preferred at that. I will therefore take the first answer out of the two as their actual entry into the results - as crude as it is, I do not have sufficient amount of entries to simply disregard them completely.

Question 1 was simple; what was the gender of the participant. The information gathered from this will be useful when: deciding upon the colour scheme, choosing which band photos are used, and general lexical choices used within the project as a whole (this refers to dialect rather than grammar).

Question 2 had the purpose of finding out what age range I will be targeting. As the chart dictates, the clear 'winner' was the 17-19 option. This will drastically weigh on decisions such as the placement of page elements, colour schemes, band photos, and of course lexical choices throughout. It would be clearly illogical to attempt some sort of go-between to appeal to all ages, and so from now on I shall be analysing just the information provided by the 17-19 age-range participants. This way I can exclusively cater to my - now official - target audience to the letter. I will, however, keep displaying the total percentage of votes using these pie charts to show a wholesome report on my questionnaire results.

Question 3 was unanimous: do my target audience actually buy music magazines? Well, of course they do.

Question 4 was made to see which magazine is the most popular among the total amount of participants. In conjunction with question 5, the magazine that was labeled 'metal' the most was Metal Hammer. Go figure. This means that I can justifiably use MH as a sort of magazine presentation bible; I too am creating centering around the genre of metal, and so I can see how the designers of the magazine have decided to present their product - and try to understand why. This will greatly help my own design choices.

The following results are heavy on the quantitative side, and so I will simply list the options that I gave and then state how many votes they each got:
Question 6 - What do you like about this (/your chosen) magazine?
Articles and news coverage - 7
General appearance - 3
Artists covered and interviewed - 9
Branding - 1

Question 7 - Regarding content, what would you most prefer to see in the two-page spread?
General gossip - 3
Tour news - 4
New album news - 7
Exclusive album news - 1

Question 8 - What would make you consider buying a different music magazine?
More band interviews - 8
I wouldn't - 1
Improved appearance - 1
More album news and reviews - 3

The final question - 9 - was asking for an open response, and so there is no point pasting the answers in here as it will be of no extended use as viewing them from the image at the top of this blog post would be.

In conclusion, the results gathered from my questionnaire will heavily influence many of the decisions I make when producing each aspect of my project. For example: I know that the majority of my audience is male, and that I am specifically aiming the aesthetics and lexical choices to that of 17-19 year olds. The results from question 6 onwards will decide what type of article I will be creating for the double-page spread, and finally question 4 has determined the magazine Metal Hammer to be my main port of call regarding general layouts and band-photo dynamics.