“Smart Survey Design” is a loose term (bordering on a catch-all) that you’ve probably heard pitched to you.  Maybe you have used it yourself when piecing together a study.

It’s not a hollow term, by any means. Smart design has advantages for both designers and respondents. Designing “smart” simply means maintaining data integrity, both in terms of capturing statistically relevant data as well as reducing the amount of bad data caused by poor survey takers (straight liners, short responders for OE’s, speeders, cheaters, etc.).

That’s the basic idea, but there is one factor that often gets forgotten or ignored in a “Smart” design:  the respondent’s experience. You want your respondents to have a positive user experience, surveys with a human touch. They should feel good about taking the survey.

I’m not just talking about survey length or incentive, though those are certainly key tools in addressing the problem.  What I am referring to is the very way we talk to the respondent, the questions asked and how many times we ask that question.

It is easy for us as researchers to become so lost in our need for quality data that we forget the source of it—human beings. People are rational and emotional creatures. How do they feel about their participation?  It’s an important consideration, all too often ignored.

Identifying and avoiding potential pain points may not only help to reduce the number of scrubs and drop-outs, but also deliver better, more reliable data.

Have you ever been on a conference call where the speaker repeats the same point 5 times?  Did you like it?  Did you continue to pay attention or did you look at your phone or check your email?  Now imagine that same conference call. The speaker drones on with 4 more points that are roughly one hair’s width different from the original ones. Frustrating!

Plenty of studies out there get too repetitive in hopes of garnering nominal, ordinal, interval, and ratio data just to present the client with 4 different charts.  But you should ask yourself, how reliable are the opinions offered by a respondent that you have just bored and or annoyed?

Some repetition may be unavoidable, especially when you want to determine which of a group of stimuli is most attractive to your target, but you should not bludgeon the people who are meant to be helping you.

Pain point #2: Being too clever

“If you could be a tree, what tree would you be and why?”

This may be a good opener for your therapist to crawl around the workings and motivations of your mind, but some respondents may find such questions to be intrusive or something worse: “hogwash.”  They have signed up to take part in survey research, but they’re not lab rats!

We come back to the reliability question: how reliable is the data you are gathering if your respondent has been made uncomfortable and just wants to finish the ordeal and get out?

The prospect of getting “deeper data” out of your survey may be very alluring, but consider how appropriate those questions are for your audience.  Does a panelist really need to imagine their favorite restaurant as a spirit animal in order to tell you what their favorite sandwich is?

Pain Point #3: Being too “research-y”

While gathering data or even when trying to cut time off the length of interview in consideration for the respondents, questions might be presented impersonally or curtly. These rapid-fire “cold” questions, though absolutely focused, clear and concise, run the risk of boring a respondent into unintentional mental lethargy.

Questions can eliminate responders who have lost interest in your data set, but wouldn’t it be more beneficial to prevent the need for creating them in the first place?  You don’t have to write a narrative or tell a knock-knock joke to keep them engaged with the process.  Panelists are people. You should just remember to “speak” to them conversationally, instead of clinically prompting and probing for responses.

By being more aware of the respondent’s pain points and making a few tweaks to your surveys, you can improve completion rates, quality of open-ended responses and data integrity.  Better yet, it does all this without incurring any additional costs.