Cvent Survey

Question order is an important part of questionnaire design. Whether it's a paper feedback form on customer satisfaction or an online survey to gather employee feedback, how you order your questions could impact your survey findings. When you create surveys, dont simply list the questions in the order they pop into your head. The ideal survey has a natural flow and the question order makes sense.

Thankfully, most web based survey management software gives surveyors the freedom to rearrange survey questions to achieve the best question order. Unlike when you're creating a survey in an office suite - like Microsoft or Open Office - where the survey creator needs to copy, paste and delete to rearrange questions, online survey tools allows you to move questions with a click of a button.

If you're new at creating questionnaires, here is a commonly used, and accepted, method for ordering questions:

1. Qualifying questions
2. Open ended questions
3. General/Overview questions
4. Specific questions
5. Demographic questions
6. Additional comments question

It's important to start off general and move towards more specific questions. Otherwise, when someone is answering a general question, after answering specific questions, their honest general feelings are likely to get skewed either towards their feelings about the last set of questions or overall. I like to think of this scenario:
For me this scenario really brings home the importance of question order. When you sit down to design your next online survey project spend some time thinking about the flow of your survey. I think you'll find it's a lot easier to order survey questions logically than it may seem reading about how to do it. However, if you still find it difficult to create a survey with logical question flow, Cvent offers online survey services through our Professional Services Group that can help you with survey question design.