Designing a Better Survey

While anyone can send out a survey, designing one is truly a science. When getting my Master in Public Administration, I took an entire semester on research methodology, during which I learned how to create statistical tools that systematically describe information, apply empirical evidence to the discovery of intuitive and experiential knowledge, and inform decision making through accurate generalization and hypothesis testing. It was one of the most impactful classes of my education, and I continue to reference the calls and apply these skills today.

In the same way that designers tend to notice the details in our physical environment, the class made me sensitive to the types of questions asked in surveys and the outcomes they produce. Creating a good survey for clients can be an incredibly powerful tool that leads to better design outcomes. Here are five things to consider the next time your team uses a survey in their design process.

1. Determine Demographics
HR departments frequently urge us to remove questions regarding the age of the individual taking the survey. We often can bring the issue back into play by asking people to respond to different ranges, indicating the generation in which they were born. While it is true that generational bias can poison company culture, understanding how different generations are responding to their current environment and how to future proof against it goes a long way to creating design solutions that work best for everyone.

2. Pick the Right Tool
I am as big of a fan of freeware as the next person. After all, why pay for something you do not have to? In this case, the survey user experience is equally as important as how you compose the questions. Paying for options that allow you to use slider values, mad differentials, conjoint analysis, etc., can be used to create interactive questions that provide a greater amount of feedback in a shorter amount of time.

When was the last time you researched the latest survey tools and took into consideration how the survey experience may be driving the outcomes, including the overall number of completed responses?

3. Minimize Open-Ended Questions
The most insightful surveys quantify qualitative information. Open-ended questions, while fun to read, are much harder to properly evaluate and provide less definitive data. Researchers will sometimes use open-ended questions to discover which answers are the most common and use them to help design questions that best reflect the most popular responses. Finally, people are less prone to answering open-ended questions, either choosing to skip them completely or, in the worst-case scenario, abandoning the survey altogether if they are required.

4. Repeat Surveys
If you are not using the same survey on a regular basis, then you are missing out on a huge opportunity to benchmark your findings across all your clients. To do this, you need to ensure that your survey will pass approval through HR and relative council. We have done a lot of work to ensure that 90 percent of our survey remains the same, allowing us to cater the remaining 10 percent to the specific organization. The process has provided us invaluable criteria to measure individual organizations against. Using the same survey also allows us to look at changes within an organization over time, whether it’s 30, 60, or 90 days post occupancy or a more annual basis.

5. Utilize Outcomes
Go the extra mile to analyze and meaningfully present survey outcomes goes a long way to supporting your client’s decision-making process and justifying your own design decisions. The best survey tools give you a variety of different ways to utilize the findings. Newer tools, like Survature, assess survey behavior, to understand which responses were chosen first by respondents, which where changed, and which were outright ignored (by seeing their mouse skim over the question altogether). We often export survey survey data into data visualization software like Tableau or QlikView, which gives our clients the ability to analyze the data in the way that is most meaningful for them or better highlight specific findings.

Surveys can be powerful tools with the potential of creating data that clients will be compelled to pay for. How are you leveraging surveys in your firm and what opportunities are you possibly missing out on?

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This article was first published in Contract Magazine.