The success or failure of your project depends on different factors, this guide will help you to understand critical aspects while creating online surveys.
Focusing on the major elements of this guide can help you to collect high-quality data, which will be useful before taking any business decision.
1. Understanding of online pattern
Telephonic surveys or personal interviews majorly depends on the interviewer’s action, and that makes respondents acknowledge it easily. But when you want to conduct an online survey, everything will rely on question’s wording and the representation.
You can’t take advantage of human presence while conducting online interviews that means your survey layout, word choice, phrasing and color choice are only prospects which can help. These little points are considered in how easily respondents adapt your questions. So remember this point, because if you won’t then it will affect your final data.
2. Ease of survey
You surely don’t want your respondents to take your survey as a burden, tangled questions can impact the answering ability of your respondents. It doesn’t mean that you need to skip important aspects of questions while creating survey but make sure that they won’t be too confusing.
If you won’t work on this point, then it can lead your survey to a higher non-response rate. So, keep that in mind if you want a good response rate from your respondents.
3. Choice of words in the survey
You surely don’t want your respondents to take your survey as a burden, tangled questions can impact the answering ability of your respondents. It doesn’t mean that you need to skip important aspects of questions while creating survey but make sure that they won’t be too confusing.
If you use abstruse language, erroneous terminology, or highly technical words, your respondents may not be willing (or able) to provide answers.
Also, make sure you don’t merge two different questions, and if you need to do so, then provide clear instruction without confusing them toward one answer or another.
By following this instruction, you can get high-quality information from your respondents.
4. Question flow
Logical flow should be there in your survey pattern. It may confuse your respondents if you jump around from topic to topic, it might generate the probability of skipping question or abandoning the whole survey.
Test your survey pattern by yourself after designing it, focus on the responder’s point of view and if you find any inconsistency then try to resolve it. Your main goal should be making the responder’s experience good, so their willingness to provide you with the right information could also increase.
5. Different Survey Formats
One major thing is to understand the need of your end data is quantitative or qualitative? Your question format should rely on that factor. Both of these types serve different roles, the quantitative study allows you to get numeric data which is logical and statistical, on the other hand, the qualitative study allows your respondents to elaborate the reason behind their choices.
For the right amount of qualitative and quantitative questions, you need to understand the level of detail your project required to achieve the aim.
6. Accuracy of the response
Accuracy of your received data will depend on the target audience you are choosing in your survey designing, not everyone will be helpful in your study, your pattern should clarify your expected respondent in starting of your survey. This will allow to focus on your niche, rather than hovering around for irrelevant respondents.
7. Bias in Self-Reported answers
The memory of a person tends to be less accurate when it comes to sublunary behaviour because we generally don’t categorize events by periods. To understand this phenomenon let’s see an example: If you will ask a person that “how much time they spent on mobile today?” they will tell you the figure, but when you will ask “how much time they spend on mobile in a year?” then the figure won’t be reliable.
So if you want your study to be reliable then you must focus on this point, because it’s all about measuring behaviour which is relevant to your respondents to help you capturing their potential state of mind.
8. Visual Impact
Visual aspects of your survey design are very crucial to implement. Font size, colour combination and emphasizing on words creates an impact on the respondent’s thinking behaviour. If it’s not properly used then you will get the measurement errors which can reflect on your study’s result.
9. Analysing of Data
If you are planning to get better results with your online survey and then try to analyse the output on regular basis, be prepared to replicate your survey pattern, because if at any point you find some confusing data from your respondents then there must be some issues with your questions, maybe by changing them slightly can help you to get the expected outcome.
If you are considering to create online survey then these aspects will surely help you, please share your inputs on this.