WebSurveyor: Online Survey "Best Practices"
Online surveys have gained popularity over the past couple of years, and it is now possible for anyone to create an online survey within minutes. While it sounds simple enough to create a few questions and responses, generating a successful online survey is more difficult than most people realize. The creation and deployment process is critical in obtaining accurate survey results, and we have complied the following list of "Best Practices" to assist you in getting the most out of your online survey projects.
- Keep it simple. When creating your survey, avoid wordy or confusing questions. Construct your questions in a manner which is easy to understand and will assist you in obtaining precise responses from the respondents.
- Be resourceful. We strongly encourage you to do your research and find out what survey development training resources are available to you. WebSurveyor U is online training including tips for creating/customizing surveys and analyzing survey results. This can be accessed from the WebSurveyor Help menu. Additionally, SkillSoft and Books24x7 provide a variety of survey-related resources, and can be accessed at http://skillsoft.uiowa.edu.
- Be aware of your environment. In order to avoid "over-surveying" respondents, be aware of other surveys which might target your audience. Additionally, it is generally a good idea to avoid sending surveys out immediately before holidays and school breaks. Other times you may wish to avoid are around weekends in general - Friday afternoon survey will likely be received on Friday, tucked away and forgotten about by Monday. Mondays can also be a bad time as people are generally overwhelmed with messages received over the weekend.
- Keep it short. In general, people do not usually participate in surveys which take longer than 15 minutes to complete. Keep your survey short to avoid high abandonment rates. If this is not possible, consider inserting page breaks (which will allow respondents to come back to finish the survey at a later date) or breaking the survey up into two separate surveys.
- Consider using the Question Library. WebSurveyor's Question Library allows you to be much more efficient and faster when creating your surveys. You have the ability to save your own questions, response options and display templates to your personal library for use in any survey that you create.
- Test your survey. After you have created and published your survey, it is important for you to test the survey's functionality to ensure you are receiving the results you wish to achieve. Not only should you test the survey's performance on various operating systems and browsers, but you should generate multiple responses to ensure you are able to generate the analyzing and reporting features you wish to obtain. Ask a friend or colleague to take your survey, to determine if there are any confusing or unclear questions. Once you have finished testing the survey, you can delete your responses before making the survey public.
- Backup your survey. The ITS policy for survey restoration is for disaster recovery only. For this reason, it is very important for you to make a backup copy of your surveys and responses regularly. Information on creating a backup copy of your survey can be found at http://cs.its.uiowa.edu/sda/survey/backupsurvey.shtml.
