A lot of thought and time goes into survey design, from question creation to the graphical template to the email message and list segmentation. But, when you sit down to design your questionnaire, are you thinking about page breaks? Page breaks in an online survey is often an over looked feature that can increase a survey's usability and decrease abandonment rates.
Typically online survey software solutions give you more control over the survey respondent experience. Next time you create a web survey, keep these page break tips in mind:
• Don't break on every page. Like everything else, there are always two extremes, never inserting a page break and always inserting a page break. Neither approach is ideal with online questionnaires. One long survey where the respondent just has to keep scrolling and scrolling and scrolling and... can be pretty intimating.
• Try to combine demographic and screener questions on one page. These types of questions are typical at the beginning and end of a survey, and they're usually expected. Keep it quick and easy for the respondent by condensing them into as few pages as possible.
• Survey question logic doesn't work on one long page. To effectively use skip and branch logic, as well as other advanced conditional logic, page breaks are essential. It's not a matter of it's intimidating for the user or encourages them to change answers. It's a matter of the survey software needs to "take in" the answers in order to put the respondent back on the correct path.
• Gives survey respondents the chance to abandon the survey. If you're using page breaks in excess, after a few pages, your survey respondents may begin thinking about leaving your web survey all together. It's easy to start adding page breaks and lose track of the over all usability from the respondent's point of view, consider the pros and cons of using a progress bar when you have a lot of page breaks in your survey.
• More page breaks takes the respondent longer to complete the survey due to page load times. We live in a world of fast internet connections, but there still internet users who have slow connections. If you've added a lot of graphics to your survey, load times become even more of a pain for your survey respondent.
• Cannot send partial email survey reminders without page breaks. Many online survey company's applications, including Cvent, can only save a respondent's answers when they click to the next page. It's a great feature to be able to send a reminder to survey participants if they abandoned the survey without finishing it, and give them the chance to pick up right where they left off. However, without page breaks, you're taking this feature out of your survey toolbox.
• Final tip: Think about how long each page of an online survey would be if it was printed on paper, is it reasonable?
Typically online survey software solutions give you more control over the survey respondent experience. Next time you create a web survey, keep these page break tips in mind:
• Don't break on every page. Like everything else, there are always two extremes, never inserting a page break and always inserting a page break. Neither approach is ideal with online questionnaires. One long survey where the respondent just has to keep scrolling and scrolling and scrolling and... can be pretty intimating.
• Try to combine demographic and screener questions on one page. These types of questions are typical at the beginning and end of a survey, and they're usually expected. Keep it quick and easy for the respondent by condensing them into as few pages as possible.
• Survey question logic doesn't work on one long page. To effectively use skip and branch logic, as well as other advanced conditional logic, page breaks are essential. It's not a matter of it's intimidating for the user or encourages them to change answers. It's a matter of the survey software needs to "take in" the answers in order to put the respondent back on the correct path.
• Gives survey respondents the chance to abandon the survey. If you're using page breaks in excess, after a few pages, your survey respondents may begin thinking about leaving your web survey all together. It's easy to start adding page breaks and lose track of the over all usability from the respondent's point of view, consider the pros and cons of using a progress bar when you have a lot of page breaks in your survey.
• More page breaks takes the respondent longer to complete the survey due to page load times. We live in a world of fast internet connections, but there still internet users who have slow connections. If you've added a lot of graphics to your survey, load times become even more of a pain for your survey respondent.
• Cannot send partial email survey reminders without page breaks. Many online survey company's applications, including Cvent, can only save a respondent's answers when they click to the next page. It's a great feature to be able to send a reminder to survey participants if they abandoned the survey without finishing it, and give them the chance to pick up right where they left off. However, without page breaks, you're taking this feature out of your survey toolbox.
• Final tip: Think about how long each page of an online survey would be if it was printed on paper, is it reasonable?
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