Online Survey Project

In the past, we've given you reasons to use progress bars and suggestions for when to avoid them in your online survey design. Fortunately (or unfortunately - sometimes I'm not sure which), everyone needs to make their own decisions about the use of a progress bar in their web survey project. When you're answering a paper survey created with paper questionnaire software (sometimes this is just Microsoft Word), your survey respondents can see all the questions at one time and make the decision to complete the survey or throw it in the trash.

However, online survey respondents don't have the same luxury, but survey development software gives survey creators the ability to add in a progress bar. Progress bars give respondents some indication of the survey questionnaire's length. Depending how it's set up, you can show them the percentage of the survey completed, number of pages completed compared to the total number of pages or a simple bar that fills up as they go.

Unfortunately, some survey layouts "abuse" the progress bar. I say abuse because I personally do not like it when someone with a longer survey has one question per page and a progress bar. When the questionnaire is longer, the progress bar never moves - making me want to abandon the survey after just a few questions. There's just a lot of clicking and waiting for pages to load when each question is on it's own page, particularly when the progress bar is laughing at you calling out, There's no end in sight! You suuuucka!

I'm sure you can guess what's coming next: my online survey tip for using progress bars. Always consider the user experience. It is arguably one of the most important parts of your survey design. If survey respondents feel they're not getting any closer to the end of your survey and have to wait for each page to load may cause them to feel it's not worth it.

I'm not saying don't ever use progress bars. When used effectively, they're a great online survey software feature to encourage survey participants to finish your survey. I'm just urging you to seriously think about your entire web survey layout before checking that option when creating surveys online.