Cvent Survey

The survey respondent experience is important. If the experience is bad, respondents are more likely to give you bad data or abandon your survey. You can be the judge of which one you think is worse. But what about requiring questions, do you think they're good or bad?

I wont try to persuade you from whichever you think it is. Okay, I lied, but I'll only try a little. It's pretty inevitable you're going to ask a question the respondent doesn't want to answer; perhaps they don't want to answer because they feel the information is private, don't have an opinion, don't know the answer or something else entirely. Whatever their reason for not wanting to respond, if you require responses to that question to move on, you're doing yourself and your web survey a disservice. When a respondent comes to a required question they don't want to answer, they only have a handful of choices:

None of these options are what you really want. You may argue you want them to rethink the question and how they feel because it requires them to give their answer real thought. This is the argument I hear everytime I bring up the this topic. But honestly, not many respondents are going to sit thinking about your survey question to give you honest feedback if they don't want to answer it to begin with.

I would argue abandonment is the best thing that could happen to your survey data. Any of the other choices skews your results, because it's not honest feedback. There are some key questions you may want to require when you create an online survey, and you should. Some questions could be essential to your survey research. A good example is qualifying questions. If this is the case, give the respondents an out by supplying an unsure/don't know or prefer not to answer option.

Survey design is the most important part of the respondent experience. Good web survey design should result in a respondent experience that is as quick and painless as possible.