These are all good questions, but unfortunately there is no ONE good answer. The “right” number of questions for a survey depends on the survey, the survey audience, and your resources for acting on the information received.

This means we need to look at the factors that determine an acceptable length for a survey and use those to guide our thoughts on survey length (for both online surveys and offline surveys).

The main factors that determine an acceptable length for your survey are:

1. The relationship between you and the respondent.
2. The relevance of your survey’s subject matter to the respondent.
3. The thought put into the survey questions and how the survey flows.
4. The likelihood that you will use the information from the survey to make a decision.
5. The resources (time, money, and people) you have to implement the results of the study in a timely fashion.

Let me explain each factor so that you can understand how each affects the acceptable survey length.

1. The relationship between you and the respondent.

As an example, a very loyal customer with extensive knowledge about your product can stay engaged through a longer survey. The stronger the relationship, the longer a survey can potentially be. On the other hand, if a marketer is reaching out to the general public for opinions on a new product with no prior relationship to the target audience, he or she needs to be looking at a keeping the survey short and focused.

2. The relevance of your survey’s subject matter to the respondent.

If you are doing a survey to get opinions on golf products from golf enthusiasts then the survey certainly can be longer than a community survey on the workings of its local government. In general, people don’t mind spending a few minutes on a survey of passing interest, but will spend quite a bit longer on a survey that covers a topic near and dear to them.

3. The thought put into the survey questions and how the survey flows.

Respondent-friendly surveys are easier to complete and thus reduce survey fatigue. While writing the survey you need to think about how much effort it will take a respondent to answer the questions. The question type (e.g. ranking questions), the content involved, and the length of the survey questions all deserve consideration when aiming for a respondent-friendly survey.

4. The likelihood that you will use the information from the survey to make a decision.

It may seem strange to think that your actions after the survey can affect how a respondent feels about your survey, but a respondent can usually tell how useful the information they are giving will be. If your respondent is wondering how the information they provide can possibly be used or is wondering why certain questions are being asked, they will likely lose interest quickly.

5. The resources (time, money, and people) you have to implement the results of the study in a timely fashion.

If a respondent sees action taken as a result of his or her input then they are more likely to complete a future survey thoughtfully. Many surveys are used to identify improvement opportunities, but budgets and/or resources may limit the ability to implement the opportunities identified. It might take years to act meaningfully on information gathered from 100-question survey, for example, even if they were all essential questions and engaging for the respondent. In a case like this, the survey should be broken into a number of shorter surveys and the results of each can then be acted on in a timely manner. This will keep your respondents interested in taking part in each of your surveys.

These are five factors to consider when deciding whether your survey is too long or not. You should also obtain feedback by surveying a pilot group from the target audience to help with the same decision.

In my next blog post, I’ll look at things you can do to enhance survey response rate.

Image courtesy of lisalou66 – Flickr, Creative Commons (Attribution)

We’ve also updated our library of survey templates! Unlike survey themes, a survey template is a set of pre-built survey questions that center around one particular survey topic. All SurveyGizmo users have access to our library of templates – when you create a new survey, just select “Use a pre-built template” from the New Project screen, and you’re ready to go. You can then customize the template to your heart’s content. (If you’d like more info, you can read our tutorial on how to create a survey from a survey template).

Additionally, you can now preview most of our templates from the website without having to log into your account. Just head to our Survey Guides section and browse through the survey examples. A few popular survey templates include:

• IT Satisfaction Survey Template
• Employee Survey Template
• Customer Satisfaction Survey Template
• Web Form Template

…& more.

Our Survey Guides section offers access to all the templates we carry (which currently stands at more than 75!) – and more are being added each day. Keep checking back to see what new templates we add in the coming weeks!

Image courtesy of Will Scullin – Flickr, Creative Commons (Attribution)

What is a custom field, anyway?

To understand custom fields, you first need to know a little more about how our survey software handles email invitations. When you send someone an email invitation to take your survey, SurveyGizmo’s built-in contact management system keeps track of them on a global scale (meaning “across all surveys” rather than “just linked to one survey”). We keep track of a number of different standard fields – like email address, first & last names, phone number, etc. – and keep them up-to-date over time.

But let’s say someone decides they’re tired of receiving your survey invitations. In order to keep our survey invitation deliverability high, we need to make sure that when a user unsubscribes from a survey creator, they don’t accidentally get added to the list again when the survey creator uploads a new list.

So why would I want to use a custom field?

Rather than having everything be global, there are times when you want certain respondent information to stick with that particular survey. For instance, let’s say your survey uses merge codes to pass in the respondent’s current workplace (either as a part of a question, or as a hidden value). If you were to use the globally-updated standard field in the email invitation to pass along the respondent’s workplace info, that information might be overwritten in the future, should it change.

By using a custom field, you can make sure that information associated with a particular respondent remains relevant to that particular survey, rather than being globally updated any time you update your list.

After hearing from our customers that you needed more, we now offer you 10 custom fields to use in your email invitations. And we’ve also made those fields available via our survey API, so developers can extend the capability of custom fields even further.

Happy surveying!

Image courtesy of Tim Morgan – Flickr, Creative Commons (Attribution)

For those of you who don’t use it, think of it like this: Evernote is a digital notebook that lives in the cloud. You can use it to store a huge number of different types of data, from notes to images to (in our case) survey results.

Anything you upload to Evernote is automatically synced across all your devices. If you upload it on your PC, it’s immediately available on your iPhone, on your Mac (at home), and anywhere via the Evernote website. Add to this the fact that you can share notebooks in Evernote with other people, and you have a pretty powerful collaboration tool on your hands.

Exporting Survey Results to Evernote

So why does it make sense to use a program like Evernote with our survey software? Mostly, because it’s a convenient place to store your info.

Let’s say you want to embed a form on your website to collect feedback for an event. And you want the info to be in your team’s hands as soon as it comes in. You could normally run a report, but that wouldn’t distribute all the results to your team in an easily-searchable format. In this case, a solution like exporting survey results to Evernote could be a good option.

Why not just email my survey results to myself?

It’s definitely easy to email survey results to yourself and your colleagues using SurveyGizmo. But as we all know, emails can often get lost in the shuffle of day-to-day operations. If you export survey results to Evernote, however, you wind up having them all in one, organized location, immediately accessible by all your team.

How do I export survey results to Evernote?

Every Evernote account includes an email address, that allows you to easily create new notes in your Evernote account. By leveraging this with SurveyGizmo’s automatic email actions, you can easily import your survey results.

All you need to do is:

1. Locate your Evernote email address.
2. Create a new SurveyGimo email action to automatically email survey results as soon as a survey is completed.
3. Use the Evernote email address as the to: address.

To better organize your survey results, you can tell Evernote which folder to put your results into by including it in the subject line (see this tutorial for more info). Once your results have been imported into Evernote, you can easily merge them into a single note for easier scanning and review.

That’s it! We’ll be adding a more detailed tutorial to the site shortly, and will update this blog when it’s available.

In Marni’s post, she referenced a discussion led by Sheena Iyengar, who has done extensive research on how humans respond to choice. In a nutshell, her research has found that most of us regularly claim to want more choices…but when confronted with a variety of choices, we’re usually less happy than if we had been given fewer choices to start with.

In the cases Iyengar researched, we find ourselves affected by a “decision paralysis” – where the variety of options presented to us is overwhelming, so we simply avoid making a decision.

In other words, more choices equal less action.

Other researchers have found similar results in their research – most notably, Barry Schwartz, whose book The Paradox of Choice – Why More Is Less found that eliminating choices can greatly reduce anxiety for shoppers.

So what does this have to do with online surveys?

While the two researchers above focused their research on shopping, the results of their research can clearly apply to online surveys as well. The more choices a survey respondent has to contend with, the less likely they are to take action.

In other words, when creating an online survey, you should be very aware of the number of survey choices you’re inserting into your survey. If you offer a checkbox question with a list of 24 answers, for example, it’s more likely to cause your survey respondents anxiety than a checkbox survey question with only a few answer choices.

The same can be said for essay survey questions. Let’s face it: taking a survey with a ton of essay questions is quite possibly every survey taker’s worst nightmare. It’s similar to what artists call the “blank canvas effect:” when confronted with an empty essay question that you as a survey respondent must fill out, the possibilities are endless…and that much scarier.

How many survey choices should I have?

For checkbox questions, radio questions, and other “single-list” question types, Iyengar’s research indicates that the ideal number of choices is three options. Sometimes, of course, three options won’t be enough. In those cases, we would venture to say that three predetermined survey answers and an “Other” textbox would offer a good compromise between gathering additional information and not being too overwhelming.

For other “multi-list” survey question types (like table of checkboxes survey questions), Iyengar’s findings suggest that three columns with three options each would be ideal. More than that could easily overwhelm your survey respondents.

Why survey choices are important

Ultimately, survey creators are looking to gather data. If we put something in the way of us coming up with as much good survey data as possible, we’re doing ourselves a disservice.

The more choices a survey respondent has to contend with, the less likely they are to take action. By keeping your survey options to a minimum you can make your online surveys that much more engaging…and collect better data, too.

Image courtesy of fdecomite – Flickr, Creative Commons (Attribution)

And yet people still do it all the time. They build online surveys that are way too long…and they scare off their respondents in droves.

And that sort of bad survey design can have even worse effects – if your respondents feel like you’ve wasted their time, it may reflect badly on your company or organization. They may decide to ignore all online surveys from you in the future – or worse, they may decide they want nothing to do with your products or services.

But aside from those obvious problems, there’s another survey fatigue issue that can arise: Survey fatigue can affect your data.

Let’s say you’ve created a survey with survey branching or survey page jumping that shows or hides a page or asks a different set of questions based on your respondent’s answers. And let’s just say that one branch of your survey has more questions than the other. If you were an online survey respondent and you were growing impatient with the survey, don’t you think you might choose one response over the other based on which one will get you finished quicker?

Granted, you might just abandon the survey. But if there’s some sort of incentive on the line, or if you’re really far into the survey, you might go ahead anyway.

So switching back to your role as the survey creator, you now find yourself with corrupted data because people are choosing the shortest route to get them to the end of the survey.

Now, of course, you can prevent all this by out-thinking your respondents – either keeping the same number of questions per branch, or using the “Forward Only” feature in the Survey Settings menu…but still, that doesn’t solve the root problem of survey fatigue.

The key here is that your survey respondent started off with good intentions – and then the length of your survey caused the respondent to start looking for the quickest way to the end.

So all of this is to say: think about what you’re asking on your surveys. Is it essential, or just a nice-to-have? If it’s not a must-have, ditch it, and watch your abandonment rate decline.

Photo courtesy of toolmantim – Flickr, Creative Commons (Attribution)

PS – how many of you looked at that photo and couldn’t help but yawn? That’s what we thought.

We don’t like to talk about ourselves this way, but survey software is really just a glorified web form with a backend. (I’m on vacation this week, so the sales team won’t be able to take revenge on me for saying that on our blog.)

What that means is if you are clever you can use our tool to solve a large number of office issues. The one I want to tell you about is what we call our “Order Up” system for Pancake Thursdays at SurveyGizmo.

Every Thursday we cook eggs, bacon, sausages, and pancakes (with chocolate chips in fun patterns) for the entire company. We started doing this recently, and given that there’s about fifty of us in the office now, the first time we had Pancake Thursday it took almost 6 hours to get everyone served! So the next Thursday morning we had an idea: we would send out a survey to get everyone’s order and create a simple widget using our API to show the orders as they come in. As an added bonus, it would notify each employee with an email once their order was ready!

We call it the “Order Up” system – and we can’t live without it.

The survey was pretty simple. We have just two survey questions: “What’s your email address?” and a checkbox question for what items from the menu you’d like to eat.

We also created a hidden field to flag if the order has been completed or not. The respondent never sees it – we flag it through the API when the order is ready for pickup.

We then used the survey API to create the cook’s screen. Michael is inevitably the cook each week (it was his idea). So he has a laptop set up in the kitchen which refreshes and shows him the orders as they come in. The Order Up Survey also tallies how many strips of bacon, eggs, etc that have been ordered in real-time so he can cook in bulk.

The entire system only took about an hour to set up, and it’s been a fun and easy way to make Pancake Thursdays work and get it down to only two hours of cooking. (Not to mention we’ve been hiring…so there’s that).

I mention this just as a suggestion to everyone — keep your eyes open for neat ways that a data collection tool can be used to optimize all the little internal processes at your company. If you have an idea or have an unconventional way you’re using our survey software in your company, let us know!

If you are curious, here’s the (very dirty) PHP code that we used to build the order-up dashboard! Passwords and SurveyIDs have been changed to protect the innocent (and our pancake orders).

//----  start code (don't judge us on code style)

function makeapicall($url)
{
		$ch = curl_init();
		curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
		curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_NOPROGRESS, 1);
		curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_VERBOSE, 0);
		curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1);
		curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 0);
		curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 60);
		curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);

		$buffer = curl_exec($ch);

		if ($buffer === false) {
			return false;
		}
		curl_close($ch);

 	return unserialize($buffer);

}

if(isset($_GET['orderup']))
{
	$uri = "http://restapi.surveygizmo.com/head/Survey/555555/SurveyResponse/{$_GET['orderup']}.pson?_method=POST&user:pass=hehe@acme.com:12345&data[4]=Yes";
	$results = makecall($uri);

}

//get orders

$uri = "http://restapi.surveygizmo.com/head/Survey/555555/SurveyResponse.pson?user:pass=hehe@acme.com:12345&filter[field][0]=status&filter[operator][0]==&filter[value][0]=Complete&limit=500";

$results = makecall($uri);
$orders = array();
$orderups = array();

foreach($results["data"] as $result)
{
	if($result['status'] != 'Complete')continue;

	if($result["[question(4)]"] == "Yes")
	{
		if($result['id'] == $_GET['orderup'])
		{
			mail($result["[question(2)]"],"Your Pancake Thursday order is ready!","Come and Get it!!!!",null,"-fchristian@sgizmo.com");
		}
		$orderups[] = $result;
	}
	else
	{
		$orders[] = $result;
	}
}

Photo courtesy of Andrew Currie – Flickr, Creative Commons (Attribution)

Big tip of the hat to Mario for putting this together! We all love this quick video and hope you do too.

In a classic example, a yes or no question is followed by one or two questions that refer to the previous question, such as, “If your answer to Question #1 was yes…” If you were to build this into a SurveyGizmo survey, you would need to make sure the follow-up question was not required. Otherwise, the respondent could only continue to the next page if they answered the question that doesn’t apply to them!

But alas, the answer is simple, and the process is covered in our Dynamic Show/Hide Tutorial. The feature is available with all paid plan levels and offers an elegant solution: only show the respondent the questions that are relevant to them! In other words, show only the ‘yes’ question if they actually choose ‘Yes’ in Question #1! Even better, you can choose to require the follow-up question if you want to ensure they answer the question before continuing to the next page. With the show/hide triggers, only if the question is visible will a required question stop them from moving forward without answering.

Check out the tutorial and make a leaner, meaner (kinder?) online survey!

- Paper consumption has increased six-fold over the past 50 years

- 75-85% of business documents are in paper form

- 90% of a business’ information is in documents, not databases

- One tree makes 16.67 reams of copy paper or 8,333.3 sheets

- The average US office worker uses over 10,000 sheets of printing and copying paper per year

Aside from online surveys being more eco-friendly, online surveys make the collection of data and the analysis process a more efficient and cost-effective process.

Some additional advantages of online surveys over paper include:

Cost: There are no paper, printing, postage, telephone or interviewer costs making online surveys less expensive than paper surveys

Speed: With online surveys instantaneous distribution of your survey and the real-time accumulation and tabulation of results allows for immediate survey data analysis saving you valuable time

Efficiency: Online surveys make it quick for you to facilitate repeat deployments of the same survey at any time in the future – very useful for trend analysis

Randomization: When answer options are re-arranged, skewed results due to respondents always clicking the first choice are avoided. Online surveys easily allow for randomization reducing order bias.  

Use of Advanced Survey Logic: Online surveys allow Advanced Survey Logic to be used. These features prevents confusion and annoyance, and also provides quicker progression through the survey

Anonymity: When using an online survey tool you can offer survey respondents complete anonymity thereby increasing the chances of getting honest and frank input from respondents

More Thoughtful Responses: Since online surveys can be taken where and when the respondent chooses, allowing a respondent to save their survey and come back later provides them the opportunity for a more considered reply. 

Keep in mind paper surveys still remain valuable and should not to be discounted. Both online and offline data collection results can be combined in the cases where paper surveys are necessary for some of the respondents. The data from those who can be reached only via mail, in person, or by telephone can be manually entered so that all your survey results are reviewed and analyzed together.