If you’re anything like me, you will notice that online surveys are often executed poorly.

However, if done properly, they can be a fantastic way to gather data.

You should approach your survey with a clear understanding of what it is you actually need

from the survey. Are you running it to understand your end users, inform the direction of a

design, or assess a live website? Nutting out these objectives will influence the type

of survey and the collection method you should use.

Getting your questions right is important. If you ask poor questions, you’ll get poor

responses that can’t be relied upon.

Here are some tips:

Make sure you group similar questions together, and order them logically. They also need to

be easy to understand and appropriate for the audience. Sounds obvious, but if your

questions are ambiguous, you risk having them answered incorrectly.

Avoid double negatives. For example, a question like “is your manager non-responsive”

could be reworded to be less confusing.

Avoid questions that contain two concepts. For example, asking about someone’s leadership

and communication skills in the one question could make it difficult to answer for your

audience.

Use balanced ratings scales, with an equal number of positive and negative options—this

will increase the chance that the results reflect a participant’s true beliefs.

Use open-ended questions. It can be great to use multiple-choice questions to gather

proportions of feedback and priority, and then ask the more probing, ‘Why’?

Include “don’t know” options. It’s more helpful to know that your audience doesn’t

hold an opinion on a topic rather than force them into an answer. Doing so can distort

the picture by overestimating the positive or negative.

Finally, once your survey design is complete, consider launching it to a subset of your

audience before sending it to the whole sample.

There are many online tools available for running surveys. For all but the most basic

of surveys, you should expect to pay something for the tool.

The key to a successful survey is keeping it simple: establishing the objectives and

information required from the study up-front, and then making sure the questions asked cover

them.

Keep your participants in mind when writing your questions - good luck!