Research Design

Traditional approaches to survey design are often complex, cumbersome and time consuming. Teams invest hours drafting questions and debating answer scales—only to discover late in the process that the survey is too long. What follows is a round of painful cuts, where questions, answer scales and other content are discarded after significant time and effort has already been sunk into their development. Imagine if you could avoid wasting time on questions that will never be asked and content you will never use.

By starting with a laundry list of questions, crafted in clear, customer-facing language you can more quickly identify redundancies, consider which ones matter most and scope your survey to the right length from the beginning. Time spent optimizing the survey flow, sourcing images, and writing all the interstitial language used in section transitions, instruction blocks, and other copy is kept to a minimum.

I’ve been using the customer-focused approach illustrated above for some time now. It has not only helped me to streamline survey development but also gets me to field faster and with fewer revisions.