This is good advice. I like to ask people doing surveys to list business and user experience (or other goals) explicitly and then link any question directly to those goals. There should always be a link between business goals, user experience goals, and specific questions. It is useful to create a matrix before you do detailed survey design that list that connection.
As Runar said, avoid the tendency to "tack on some interesting questions that others may have". There is some research (I'll see if I can dig it up) about the effects of location of general satisfaction questions - do you put it early because you ask specific questions about a product or service or do you put it at the end when you have asked questions that will likeliy evoke more critical thinking about a product? One of the principles that I push on survey designers is to put demographic questions (that are not explicit screeners) at the end of any survey since these questions - to the respondent - are not interesting or relevent (though they are to the survey lead). This was advice by Dillman in several of his books on survey design. I wrote a short essay in the ACM journal Interactions related to this topic: Designing useful and usable questionnaires: you can't just "throw a questionnaire together" It was in the May 2007 issue of interactions and available in the ACM Digital Library. Good topic. Thanks to those who responded. Chauncey On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 7:48 PM, Runar Normark <[email protected]> wrote: > My general advice is to make it short and relevant as pointed out by > others here. Go through the questions and ask your self, what will > you use the results of this question, and remove all nice-to-know > questions. You do not say what the purpose is, but I guess it is to > improve the site. In general make sure all questions are relevant for > the participants and for your purpose. If you want to repeat the > survey after the changes, you should include questions that target > the purpose of the redesign. > > In general, I would include an overall satisfaction question E.g. > "How satisfied are you with the site overall?" and then go into > details. > > Group questions according to theme and end it with an open ended > question to let the participants comment or give you suggestions. > > Here is a short checklist that could be helpful: > http://www.questback.com/outside/check_list_before_sending_out_your_survey.html > > Regards > > Runar Normark > Logica UX Norway > > > . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . > Posted from the new ixda.org > http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=47480 > > > ________________________________________________________________ > 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 > ________________________________________________________________ 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
