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Top 10 tips for best Survey Design

You have to be no expert to know the nuances of effective survey design. All you need to know are the tried and tested tips for survey design which have proved to be fruitful in collecting insightful data. With QuestionPro, you can create an amazing survey that’ll give the management some impactful, trustworthy pointers that can be put to good use.

Here’s a list of 10 points that can prove to be the ultimate guide for survey design.

1. Keep the survey short and crisp : Most of your customers will run as fast as they can when they come across a survey with pointless questions. To not let that happen, make sure your survey has clear and precise questions that do not bore the life out of them. The order of the questions and the time that’s taken to fill it out will play a vital role in the respondent’s answers.
2. Ask direct questions : Don’t confuse the respondents. To make sure you create an effective survey design, present questions to them that are not grammatically poor and also that make perfect sense to the customers.
3. Leave all the unwanted questions : Identify the purpose of your survey design and then begin to write the questions. Otherwise, you’ll tend to include questions that are unnecessary in the survey and that might not provide you any insights. It can annoy the users as well.
4. Avoid leading and biased questions : Questions that include biasing at one point or the other are not advisable as they prompt the respondents in a particular direction. Eliminate overusing adverbs and adjectives in your questions, remove them if not required. This can be a big turn off like the poorly constructed questions might be.
5. Use your customer's language : Terms and language that your customer database is familiar with should be used while designing a survey. It instantly makes the respondent relate to your survey and makes it easy for him/her to answer sincerely and thoroughly. Keep in mind your intention of the question and form the question accordingly.
6. Modify Yes/No questions : Though Yes/No questions are more convenient to answer, when it comes to impactful survey design and knowing the respondents, they aren’t that useful. Instead of asking a Yes/No question like: Are you frustrated with the current weather? Yes/No, you can ask: How happy or unhappy are you with the weather, provide options like “Extremely unhappy”, “Moderately unhappy”, “slightly unhappy”, and “I don’t mind the weather”.
   This will make the answer to the question more insightful than just “Yes/No”.
7. Test before sending out a foolproof survey : After creating the survey, make sure you send out an error-free survey. For that you’ll have to test it using all the possible sources like Email, communities etc. and also using every electronic medium like Mobile or laptop. Any glitches that you find during this test can be corrected before sending out the final survey.
8. Analyze the responses after collecting : Once you’ve sent out the survey, collect all the responses and maintain a document or excel sheet for the collected responses. This excel sheet should have all the mentioned classifications of the survey so that you have all the data in place. You need to make sure you follow this step and categorize data into Behaviour, Psychographics and Demographics. For any researcher, it’s extremely important to have organized data so that analyzing, predicting outcome and writing reports become easy.
9. Put a summary report together : After collecting responses and analyzing it, share your analysis with your customers. You should have all the data gathered from surveys in a particular format by this stage. The readers should get a clear picture about your goal, i.e. what were you trying to attain from the survey?
   Make sure you cover questions such as: do users prefer/use a particular product or service? Which product do the users prefer? Any comment?
10. Conclude your plan of action : Prepare your final action plan on the basis of your goal, responses put together and drawn conclusion. Mend your final plan and start executing the changes.