Tips on writing questions
- Use clear, jargon-free language
- Avoid asking generic questions that don't directly relate to important action
items. It's almost always silly to ask which operating system they use. Anytime
that you can get generally available data, use that alongside the specific
data collected.
- Avoid asking people to rank-order their top 3 or more out of many possible
options. It is very hard to answer, and impossible to aggregate the data meaningfully.
Instead, break a question like that into two separate questions:
First, ask people to select their top-most service (For example,
what offering is the most important of all?)
Second, use a check-box to list the same menu of options, and ask users to
select the top 3 or so.
- Use questions that can be answered with a range of possible answers. (Like
a conversation, it's better to avoid simple yes/no questions when you can
measure degree of intensity).
- Use meaningful adjectives rather than two anchoring poles for a five point
range answers. That means that each of 5 choices should have its own meaning
(Very Good, Good, Neutral, Bad, Very Bad).
- Radio button scales are not as easy to parse: Grading from A to F for example
is much easier for people to understand than a 1 to 7 scale, where respondents
need to recall whether 7 is Excellent or Terrible.
- Avoid using questions that only ask about an aesthetic reaction, such as
"Do you like or dislike this?"
- Use questions that connect to explicit behaviors (e.g., How likely would
you be to use this? How much would you be influenced by this?).
- When coming up with answers, anticipate a range of possible reactions and
then include one additional (open-ended) text response. Don't rely on an open
response itself, since most people have a hard time generating comments.
- Don't use negative sentences (like this one).
- If you have a ton of questions, break up the survey, and aggregate across
multiple groups.