Despite the abundance of daylighting design software, there are few tools which focus on annually comprehensive and climate-realistic data, and fewer which give performance as a function of time. Lightsolve, a tool under development, emphasizes the importance of full year, climate specific data in early stage daylight design. It performs a representative group of annual simulations based on TMY2 data and graphically displays the results using both temporal maps and spatial renderings. With any new method, it is critical to determine if the intended audience finds it more useful than existing methods. Therefore, two user surveys were given. The first was given to practitioners and students attending a daylighting design workshop at MIT in January of 2009. Participants were taught to use both Lightsolve and Ecotect (with exports to Radiance and Daysim). The aim of this survey was to help validate the usefulness of Lightsolve’s temporal approach and the intuitive nature of the temporal maps, and to observe architects’ interaction with the software. Because of the limited number of responses, a different stand-alone survey comparing spatial and temporal daylighting data was given, mostly to student architects, in May of 2009. The aim was to judge how intuitive temporal data was to the inexperienced architect. This paper presents the findings of both surveys.