Supporting Statement

OMB Control No. 0693-0043 – NIST Generic Clearance for Usability Data Collections

Feedback Form for Project 25 Inter-RF Subsystem Interface (ISSI) Network Simulation Tool

FOUR STANDARD SURVEY QUESTIONS

1. Explain who will be surveyed and why the group is appropriate to survey.

The purpose of the survey is to enable the users of the software tool developed for the “Project 25 Inter-RF Subsystem Interface” project to provide us with feedback information. The software is designed to allow Public Safety users to analyze and to understand the behavior of the network when deploying the Inter-RF Subsystem Interface (ISSI) that connects multiple Radio Frequency Subsystems (RFSSs). It is intended for public users who have visited our project website (http://www.nist.gov/itl/antd/emntg/ps_p25_tool.cfm), downloaded, and used the tool. On the project web page and the download page, NIST will invite the users to send feedback using this survey form.

2. Explain how the survey was developed including consultation with interested parties,

pre-testing, and responses to suggestions for improvement.

The various questions to the survey are the result of a deliberation between the various members of the team lead by Nada Golmie who is the manager of the Emerging and Mobile Network Technologies Group (EMNTG) in the Advanced Network Technology Division (ANTD) within the Information Technology Laboratory (ITL) at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The result consists of generic questions regarding the user satisfaction on key elements of the tool (e.g. ease of use, documentation) as well as offering areas to explain the problems encountered and possible improvements that can be made.

3. Explain how the survey will be conducted, how customers will be sampled if fewer than all customers will be surveyed, expected response rate, and actions your agency plans to take to improve the response rate.

The survey will be conducted online using a form linked from our project webpage. The survey is voluntary and we are aiming for a 100% response rate since the software targets customers with high interest in the results.

4. Describe how the results of the survey will be analyzed and used to generalize the results to the entire customer population.

The results of the survey will be summarized as follows: questions rating the satisfaction of the users (e.g. ease of use, documentation) will be averaged to provide an overall level of satisfactions. Information provided by the survey that relates to problems encountered while using the tool and suggestions on how to improve the tool will be aggregated in order to highlight major issues/improvements. This information will allow us to improve the quality of our tool and make it more useful to our customers (offer follow-up to assist the users with problems and/or discuss their proposed improvements so the tool better responds to their needs).