Online survey design tips
General Tips
- Before you start writing your survey, make sure you have a goal. Once you have set your goals, ask questions that are relevant to the set goals.
- Engage your audience by starting with interesting questions. Do not get them bored.
- Ask more personal and demographic questions at the end of the survey.
- Before publishing your survey, take a draft survey with fewer people first and get their input and review your survey.
- Make sure to ask enough people (bigger the sample better the result)
- Try to have a comment box at the end of the survey to get additional inputs that may be helpful.
Question Design
- Keep your question short and options more specific.
- Users like to click and check instead of typing in comment boxes. Try to have radio / checkbox choice buttons instead of comment boxes as a choice. This can be helpful for a better survey evaluation.
- Avoid redundant questions.
- Avoid ambiguous questions.
- Use radio buttons and check boxes as appropriate. Revise your survey multiple times if needed before publishing. Let a different set of eyes evaluate your survey before publishing.
- Use rating scale questions to measure positive and negative experiences.
- Researches indicate that the people have a tendency to click the middle buttons in the rating scale. You can avoid the neutral radio button to find out which side they are more inclined to.
- Strictly ask one thing in one question.
- Give a "does not apply" or "N/A" option if it is appropriate for questions. Otherwise you could falsely inflate the percentage of respondents ticking a particular response option.
- Do not make a question a "required" to answer unless it is really important to do so. Remember that your audience is taking your survey on a goodwill basis.
- Start with more general questions first before asking more specific ones.
- Use simple natural words for your question. Do not ask a too lengthy question.
- Colors reflect mood. So setting a good color for your survey does matters. Use right background and text colors for your survey. And choose a good clear font size. Use the suvey theme designer to customize these.
- Start the survey with a simple introduction and why the survey is important. You can use the survey page title and description text for this purpose. And start your actual questions on the second page if that suits you the best.
- When you send out survey emails, try to offer incentives and free gifts for taking the survey. This will draw more audience.
- Once you have set goals and have designed the survey, target relevant audience groups to get a better and accurate survey results.
