Questionnaire

While designing a web surveys is fairly simple, make sure you are aware of common online survey pitfalls so you can avoid them:

• Plan the correct date and time to send survey invitation emails and consider your target audience. If your survey sample is office workers, it would be best to send it out during the work week when they will be at a computer most of each day. Do a little research on what the best day is – while it is widely known that Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays are not optimal, there is always new information on this topic. Don’t forget to consider the time zone of recipients too – if you are sending something that will land at 7 p.m. their time, it will likely be buried or forgotten by morning.

• Create your questions carefully. In an online web survey, the respondents are obviously on their own. You can’t clarify things for them. Make sure the questions are clear and easy to understand.

• Keep the open-ended questions to a minimum or you will be poring through the answers for hours. Respondents tend to be more forthcoming with electronic surveys, and this is a positive thing. But just because you can get all those open-ended responses, you may not really want them. Always be thinking ahead to how you will analyze survey data and present findings.

• Entice the respondents to take the survey. Many times online surveys fail to offer enough incentive. Even though online surveys are more convenient, the respondents are still volunteering their time and should be rewarded.