Traditional survey design often leads to wasted time. 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 effort has already been sunk into their development.

Imagine the time and effort saved if you could avoid developing handfuls of questions that will never be asked. By starting with a laundry list of questions, crafted in clear, customer-facing language you can scope you survey to the right length first. Time spent optimizing the survey flow, sourcing images, and writing all the interstitial language used in section transitions, instruction blocks, and other copy is then kept to a minimum.

I’ve been using the customer-focused approach outlined below 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.