4 Tips for Effective Survey Design:

4 Tips for Effective Survey Design:

Why Survey Design is Important:

Surveys are a powerful tool that allows you to reach a large group of people cheaply, easily, and quickly. Companies typically use surveys for a few reasons, including gathering market data, segmenting customers, comparing groups, or measuring and tracking specific numbers over time, like satisfaction. To conduct a successful survey, you need to master effective survey design. While surveys can be an extremely effective tool, a poorly designed survey will lead to bad data. Lousy information will lead to bad decisions for your business. As a gym owner, surveys can be an incredibly impactful way to measure many areas of your business, such as customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction, improved member retentions, and improved marketing dollars to make them more effective. So today, we’re going to dive into a few tips that will help you improve your survey design for more effective and meaningful results. 

Tips for Effective Survey Design:

1) Keep questions simple: The best questions are simple and single-focused. In other words, your

should never ask about more than one topic, so the respondents can clearly and accurately answer your question (Quant Tools & Survey Design, Tanenbaum, Slide 13). 

2) Questions should be easy to understand: Making sure your

questions that are easy to understand are critical. Think about it, if your respondents have to struggle to know what you’re asking, then how can they answer your question accurately? A good idea to keep in mind here is to use language that your respondents will understand. If you can incorporate lingo or terminology used by your target respondent group, then even better! (Jaclyn Tanenbaum, PhD).

3) Make questions unbiased: Being unbiased in the way you ask questions is super important. When you present a question with your opinion, it can sway the way your respondents reply. Therefore, you want to make sure the questions don’t lead your respondents to a specific answer. If your question leads a respondent to a particular response, then the data you’re collecting isn’t accurate, and therefore isn’t helpful. Make sure to leave out opinions, beliefs, judgments, or any implications of your personal views in your questions. Craft your questions using neutral and unbiased terms (Jaclyn Tanenbaum, PhD). 

4) Keep respondents engaged:  

One of the biggest challenges with surveys is keeping respondents engaged and getting them to complete your survey. Breakoffs are common for a couple of reasons. For example, people might get bored or tired of filling out your survey, they might not understand what you’re asking and get frustrated, or they might not feel comfortable answering the given question for personal reasons. One way you can try to avoid breakoff is through the effective use of transitions. Transitions can tell a respondent what’s coming up in the next part of the survey, which will help them understand the upcoming questions better. Therefore, making them less likely to get confused or frustrated and exit your survey. Transitions are also a great way to let the respondent know where they are in the survey. For example, if they are approaching the end of the survey, you can throw in something like “just a few more questions.” By adding this short line, respondents getting tired are less likely to quit because now they know they are almost done with the survey (Jaclyn Tanenbaum, PhD).

Takeaway: 

When crafted well, surveys are a robust tool that can help you make better, more informed decisions for your business. By keeping in mind these four tips, you are on your way to survey stardom. 

Read last week’s post about research objective recipes here.