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When you're conducting a survey tool, questionnaires are important for you to collect information that you need for research. As a crucial component in your evaluation, crafting an online survey software questionnaire can be a little challenge too. You need to collect all the necessary data, but also, it shouldn't confuse or bore your respondents. The objective here is to help you craft up an effective questionnaire with these 15 tips.
1. Don't Sell or Talk Benefits
This is not the objective of your questionnaire. Keep your company beliefs, personal thoughts and benefits of your products to yourself. Don't bring them into your questionnaire.
2. Make It Comprehensible
Make sure everyone can understand your questions. Don't assume everybody will have the same common basis of knowledge or understanding of the facts.
3. Don't Use Loaded Questions
Loaded questions contain unjustified or controversial assumptions. They suggest to your respondents you expect a certain answer.
4. Use Simple Language with No Jargon
Only use words that are familiar and direct to your respondents. Don't assume they're familiar with the topic your questionnaire survey software is about.
5. Make Each Question Count
The purpose of your questionnaire is to gather essential insights, so each question should be aimed for hitting that target. Ensure every question drives responses and adds value that relate to your research goals directly.
6. Keep it Simple and Short While you might be totally committed to your questionnaire, it's not likely your respondents will be too. A huge part of your job in designing your survey is keeping your respondents' attention and ensuring they continue filling the questionnaire out until the end. It's not likely your respondents will reach the end if your questionnaire is long.
7. Avoid Leading Questions
Leading questions demand your respondents to provide a specific response. Your questions should be designed so your respondents can answer with their own thoughts without being led to a certain response.
8. Use Response Scales When You Can
Response scales capture the intensity and direction of attitudes and provide rich data. Binary or categorical response options, in contrast, like yes/no or true/false response options, typically produce less informative information.
9. Avoid Using Matrices or Grids for Responses
Matrices or grids of answers demand way more thinking from your respondents than a multiple choice or scale construction. Your respondents need to weigh up and understand multiple items at once and often, they don't fill in grids according to their genuine feelings or accurately.
10. Ask Closed-Ended Questions
Free-response (open-ended) questions require a lot of time and effort to answer than do closed-ended questions. Therefore, when you're crafting up your questionnaire, you should think about minimizing open-ended question use.
11. Stick With Neutral Survey Questions
Asking leading questions or putting opinions in your question prompt can influence the answers your respondents give in a way they're real feelings aren't being reflected.
12. Don't Ask for More than One Thing at a Time
Just like influencing respondents' answers is bad, so is confusing respondents. In either case, they'll come up with an answer that won't reflect their true preferences and opinions.
13. Offer Respondents an "Out" for Questions That Don't Apply
Certain respondents won't or can't answer some questions due to not having the experience or not really being sure how to respond. You should offer them the option to choose "don't know" or "doesn't apply" for these situations.
14. Avoid Double Negatives
Respondents can be confused easily trying to figure out the meaning of a question with negative word use.
15. Don't Make Long Lists of Choices
If your answer category list is unfamiliar and long, it's hard for respondents to assess them all. Keep the choices list short.
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