20 Top Tips to Writing Effective Surveys

Martin Day, a Director of SurveyGalaxy, wrote an interesting article entitled "20 Top Tips to Writing Effective Surveys." The article is simply laid out, easy to read, and offers some pretty simple straightforward tips for writing online surveys (or offline surveys for that matter). My favorite tip (of the 20) is "Ensure that the questionnaire flows: whenasking questions group the questions into clear categories as this makes the task of completing the survey easier for the participants."

Sometimes it seems that many of the folks writing surveys — even the professionals — don’t seem to get it that the people taking the survey are for the most part volunteers (unless you’re paying everyone who takes your survey and not doing some kind of a drawing, almost all of your respondents are effectively volunteers) and if you don’t make the experience interesting and perhaps even fun then it is unlikely that anyone is going to go to the trouble of finishing the survey.

Not every survey can be fun. Some surveys are on boring topics. Some surveys use complex methodologies that make it difficult to create any kind of positive user experience. But it seems to me that it is important for us to at least try. If we’re going to ask our volunteers to give us their time and their opinions, it seems that the least we can do is try to make the experience at least somewhat entertaining and interesting.

To that end, in addition to Martin’s article below, I also present you with a link to a page on SurveyGalaxy which offers a list of the most highly rated (i.e., most interesting) surveys available on SurveyGalaxy as rated by respondents. Note that these aren’t always the prettiest survey in the world or the most interactive — but something about them has made respondents give them high ratings.

• Article: 20 Top Tips to Writing Effective Surveys
• SurveyGalaxy List of Best Public Surveys