Survey Tip: Pay Attention to the Details

Why survey creators need to pay more attention to the details of wording, question types and other matters that not only affect results but also how customers view the company. A recent survey from Sage Software had quite a few issues, and gives me the opportunity to share some pointers. The survey was for follow [...]

Poor question design means questionable results: A tale of a confusing scale

I saw the oddest question in a survey the other day. The question itself wasn’t that odd, but the options for responses were very strange to me. 1 – Not at all Satisfied 2 – Not at all Satisfied 3 – Not at all Satisfied 4 – Not at all Satisfied 5 – Not at [...]

SurveyTip: Think about the number of pages in your survey

Have you seen surveys where every question, no matter how trivial, is on a different page?  Or how about surveys that are just a single long page with many questions? Neither approach is optimal.  They don’t look great to your primary customer — the survey taker — perhaps reducing your response rate. What’s more, you [...]

SurveyTip: Randomizing question answers is generally a good idea

Showing question answers in a random order reduces the risk of bias from the position.   To understand this, think of what happens when you are asked to choose a question by a telephone interviewer.  When the list of choices are presented for a single choice question, you might be think of the first option as [...]

Today’s tortured questionnaire wording

I just have to share this in the hope that a reader will be able to enlighten me.  What could this possibly mean? Not a provider that I would think of at first, but I probably would not consider it OK, let me give some context. This is from a survey on business internet services. [...]

When Validation Backfires

I just came across an interesting issue with validation in an online survey using a Van Westendorp pricing model.  Van Westendorp is one of the common ways to test pricing by directly questioning prospective purchasers.  This post isn’t about Van Westendorp, also known as the Price Sensitivity Meter (you can find plenty of references online, [...]

Why don’t surveys support Firefox?

Some surveyors don’t support Firefox in their online surveys. Why is this a mistake?