As you may know, this summer I am leading the design of the inaugural State of HTML survey. Naturally, I am also exploring ways to improve both survey UX, as well as all questions.
Shaine Madala, a data scientist working on the survey design team proposed using numerical inputs instead of brackets for the income question. While I was initially against it, I decided to explore this a bit further, which changed my opinion.
You have likely participated in several Devographics surveys before, such as State of CSS, or State of JS. These surveys have become the primary source of unbiased data for the practices of front-end developers today (there is also the Web Almanac research, but because this studies what is actually used on the web, it takes a lot longer for changes in developer practices to propagate).
You may remember that last summer, Google sponsored me to be Survey Design Lead for State of CSS 2022. It went really well: we got 60% higher response rate than the year before, which gave browsers a lot of actionable data to prioritize their work. The feedback from these surveys is a prime input into the Interop project, where browsers collaborate to implement the most important features for developers interoperably.
So this summer, Google trusted me with a much bigger project, a brand new survey: State of HTML!
