Catriona Lohan-Conway asked: > > Can anyone point me to best practices for quick online survey design?
If it's a single-question quick poll that's mainly there to amuse the visitor, then the crucial rules are: - one question, answers with radio buttons - find a way to track whether this user has voted or not - made the results so far available immediately the user presses 'send' (or whatever you call the button: 'vote' also works nicely). - don't treat the results as anything other than an amusement. If it's a survey that you want to gather data to support business decisions, that's a lot trickier. I'd almost go so far as to say that you shouldn't do it if you don't have time to do it properly. But I know that organisational realities often force us into doing things quickly when that's a bad idea. Biggest rule: test, test, test. It's incredibly difficult to write good survey questions that really reflect user opinion and obtain the insights you want. You'll only find out if you're close to OK if you test. It's a bit easier if you go for all 'open' questions (i.e., a question with a box for free text). Downside: those questions take longer to analyse. If you must offer radio button/checkbox questions, always include an option for 'other' with a box to type into. At least for the first three or four iterations of your text/analyse cycle. Shorter is better, obviously. Find some way of selecting the people that you offer the survey to, and track your response rate. You'll see claims along the lines of "a 2% response rate is typical for online surveys" - this claim is true, but it omits the crucial point that a 3% response rate is useless. That's right, most online surveys are useless. Longer discussion of this point: http://www.usabilitynews.com/news/article2528.asp and a follow-up article on response rates: http://www.usabilitynews.com/news/article4209.asp If you include a rating scale, my advice is to go for a 5-point scale (plus a 'don't know/prefer not to answer' type of option. Discussion of why is here: http://www.usabilitynews.com/news/article1269.asp You probably don't have the time to tackle a book on survey design, but if you do then the one to go for is "Internet, Mail, and Mixed-Mode Surveys: The Tailored Design Method" by Dillman, Smith and Christian (or if you prefer not to shell out US$50 plus, then any of the previous editions will also be OK). There's also a lot of overlap between survey design and forms design. For example, our book "Forms that work: Designing web forms for usability" has a chapter on 'persuading people to answer' that would be very relevant to survey design. www.formsthatwork.com or any bookshop. Hope this helps Caroline Jarrett www.formsthatwork.com ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [email protected] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
