About me

After working in market research for over 20 years, I have opinions.

My first job out of grad school was with a small boutique firm. I later worked for one the larger market research firms and then finally inside one of the better-known technology companies.

I spent a lot of time working in customer experience during the early 2000s. Many of the CE/CX surveys I saw were painfully long, with wordy questions that smacked of internal corporate language. It was about this time I began thinking about how to write the perfect survey question.

I fought hard during those years for better survey design, often meeting stiff resistance from colleagues, many of whom had strong opinions of their own. By the time I moved to product research (and after many, many focus groups) I had become determined to create a tool kit of my own that I could use and improve as I continued to work on my craft.

Whether in a web survey, an in-depth interview or some other methodology, we need to talk to our research participants like they are human beings. Surveys should be surveys. Not surgeries. We need to make our research participants feel like they are part of a conversation. To do this, we need to ask them fewer, better questions.

This site is a collection of articles, templates and other stuff that has helped me to consolidate my thinking and provide information I can continually reference for my own personal use. Maybe you might like to use some of what I’ve learned over the years. Or maybe you’d like to compare notes or contribute some of your own ideas. If so, let’s have a conversation.

Steven Pelecky