Have you gotten those emails asking you for 3 minutes of your time? Probably from a company that you made some kind of business with. Have you then thought that ”Sure I can do that” only to regret that when you 4 or 5 minutes later realizes that it did not take three minutes if you wanted to answer the form truthfully.
Many forms are asking questions that will never be used. I have heard representatives from Marketing say on a number of occasions -well let’s just add that question about gender, you never know we might need it at some point and it is easy to respond to.
The thing is for every added question no matter how simple, you will lose some respondents. But far worse, for every added question the truthfulness of reminding questions will also go down.
The worst trap to fall into is to have to many nested questions, meaning where a certain reply from you trigger follow up questions. -you answered that you like apples, now describe to us what make you love apples so much… If you add this type of questions be sure that only very few people will tell you in the following step, that they like oranges (even if they do).
It is hard to create god questionnaires but if the technic use to fill the form is easier, smarter, sleeker and prettier you can make more people answer and do it with honesty and still not feel exhausted by doing so.
What to do?
I want to give you a tip, use Typeform. A form created with this tool look great, is easy and quick to fill out and it works across devices! WOW! I do not want to fill another non-typeform ever again. Well done you Barcelona people.
Typeform examples to look at
If you take results seriously I know you work a lot with your questions, you check them, double check them, you do a pilot with only a few respondents. But then, do you think about if the tool you use is appropriate? Does it let your respondents use the phone efficiently on the commute to respond? The less you intrude on their daily lives and let them use lower quality time and less time to respond the better result you will give.
Some think that an incentive (the usual, respond to our survey and be one lucky winner of an iPad) might make users more willing to struggle through a long survey. Some might others might look for the shortcut to the last question just to be able to add the e-mail address and take part of the price-draw.
And to all those people from Marketing out there, if you do not know how you gonna use the answer from a question in a questionnaire, erase that question!
Interested in getting an audit? Contact me.
