NIH Generic OMB Clearance for Evaluation of NIH Website User
Satisfaction
RENEWED UNTIL 07/31/2010 - with new
reporting requirements
The National Institutes of Health has been authorized by OMB under
OMB No. 0925-0486 to use rapid processing for certain kinds of
web user satisfaction surveys. The OD Online
Information Branch (OLIB) administers the program on behalf
of the NIH Project Clearance Branch, OD, OER, OPERA.
Please direct any questions regarding OMB clearance for all other
information collection requests to the NIH Project Clearance Branch,
attention Marilyn Tuttleman, M.S. (301) 594-7949, or Ms. Mikia
Currie, (301) 435-0941.
This expedited process takes 4-6 weeks from the time OLIB
receives your request to the time it is cleared.
Please follow these steps when submitting your request to clear
an online survey:
- Design your Online Survey Instrument
No need to program it just yet! OMB wants to review your survey
questions in a Microsoft Word document. Be
sure to include the Burden
Disclosure statement at the beginning of the document,
right under the title of your survey.
- Calculate your target number of responses
Ask your Web Manager to tell you how many unique users visit
your Web site/page each month. Multiply by 20%, which is the
response rate OMB assumes for customer satisfaction surveys.
If you think the resulting number won't provide you with enough
data, contact Mangala
Manivannan to discuss additional strategies to bring in respondents.
- Complete the Submission Form
- Submission
Form - download to your desktop and fill it out using Microsoft
Word
- Instructions (PDF - 24 KB) -
should you need more information to complete the form (PDF
format)
- Send the Submission Form and the Survey Instrument
to OLIB
Submit your Survey Instrument along with the Submission Form
in Microsoft Word format to manivannanm@mail.nih.gov.
If all of the questions are OMB-compliant, OLIB will send your
Survey Instrument to OMB. If not, OLIB will contact you with
further guidance.
- Build the Web tool for your Survey
Once your survey instrument has been cleared, OLIB will give
you a unique OMB number to place on the first page of your
online form, along with the expiration date of the clearance
(07/31/2010). This identification number may not be used on
any other online form.
- Section
508 (PDF - 2.37 MB) - make sure your Survey is universally accessible
- Formatting -
using branching or skip logic to reduce burden on respondents
- Usability (PDF - 14.7 MB) -
guidelines for designing user-friendly Web forms
- SurveySuite
Tool - from the Office of Management Assessment, a program
that allows you develop custom online surveys from your desktop
- Launch the Survey on your Web site
Once you have launched the survey on your Web site, be sure to
keep close track of the number of responses you receive so
that you can remove the survey once the target number of respondents
has been reached. Incomplete responses count.
- Send a copy of the results report to OLIB
Whether it's a PowerPoint slide show, a 200-page Microsoft Word
report, or an Excel spreadsheet of raw data, OMB requires that
you send your results report to manivannanm@mail.nih.gov.
OLIB will not share your results with anyone else without your
permission.
- Document the changes you make to your Web site
With the renewal of this clearance, OMB requires that you document
any changes you make to your Web site based on the online survey
results. Be sure to review your results report and specifically
address suggestions for improvements from site visitors, documenting
whether or not it was appropriate to incorporate the suggestions
into the Web site, and why. A brief narrative in Microsoft
Word will suffice.
- Send this Web site change report to OLIB
Please send the document describing the Web site changes to manivannanm@mail.nih.gov.
OLIB will not share your results with anyone else without your
permission.
Other useful information:
This page was last reviewed on
March 26, 2008
.