Tiny Tip Tuesday #13

The importance of testing your survey

When you create a survey, it's important that you test before publishing it. We'll see how this can contribute to improving your survey responses.

To start with, you can use the preview option to see how your changes would appear in the survey. You can even share the preview of your survey with a colleague or friend and ask for suggestions to be made before you launch it.

A fresh pair of eyes could find glaring mistakes and typos that you would have missed out on while creating and designing it.

Check the question wording and change confusing or vague questions, if any, and make it less ambiguous to your respondents. Make sure there are no readability issues and finalize the choice of font and color.

There's another way of testing it — by sending your survey to a focus group before actually publishing it. This would give you a third person perspective on how your respondents would actually perceive the survey. This testing would give you more room for improvement and thereby impact your survey response rates when you finally publish it to a larger audience. If you’re using our research panels we suggest that you first test with around 10-20% of your intended audience before sending it to your whole audience.

Can you think of any other ways to test your survey? Let us know your thoughts and wait for more interesting tips in the coming weeks.