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.

So without any further ado, here are the most recent tips:

1. Want to close your survey after a specific quota? Use Response under Edit Survey > Advanced Options

2. Logic and Branching questions should be mandatory and should be the last question on the page

3. Make survey instructions distinct from questions by using a different color or font, it will make your survey easier to follow

4. Clear out your test responses to start with a clean slate under Reports > Data Management Options

5. If your survey asks sensitive items, be sure you clearly state your confidentiality policy and adhere to it 

If you can’t wait for the weekly update be sure to follow SurveyGizmo on twitter to get the new tip each day. You can find the compiled lists of the Survey Tip of the Day and additional online survey tips and suggestions here at the SurveyGizmo blog as well as links to helpful SurveyGizmo tutorials. If you have any survey tips you would like to share leave us a comment or send us an email, SurveyGizmo is all about feedback.

So without any further ado, here are the most recent tips:

1. Pre-test your survey with several respondents before deploying to find glitches and/or unexpected question interpretations

2. If making a question required, be sure you cover all of the possible responses and include a N/A if appropriate

3. Posing questions in the 3rd person can be less threatening i.e. How do YOUR COLLEAGUES feel about mgmt vs How do YOU feel

4. When using Logic or Branching, be sure to test all of the sequences carefully before launching the survey 

5. Only need a higher acct plan for a month or two? You can easily upgrade or downgrade at any time 

If you can’t wait for the weekly update be sure to follow SurveyGizmo on twitter to get the new tip each day. You can find the compiled lists of the Survey Tip of the Day and additional online survey tips and suggestions here at the SurveyGizmo blog as well as links to helpful SurveyGizmo tutorials. If you have any survey tips you would like to share leave us a comment or send us an email, SurveyGizmo is all about feedback.

Well we have solution for you!

We won’t actually be creating separate Thank You pages (because you can’t really do that and collect the information you want), but what we will be doing is creating separate content to show on the Thank You page and then hide it depending on previous answers.

To do this you’ll need to have one of our Pro Accounts because you will need our Advanced Logic and Piping capabilities. Other than that, you should be good to go!

To Set Up Multiple Thank You Pages- 5 Easy Steps!

Step 1: Figure out which questions will decide what thank you page your survey takers will see and make them required.

Step 2: On the real Thank You page, add individual descriptive texts (the Add Text/Image button found at the bottom) for each one of your personalized “Thank You” pages. This step is a bit confusing, so I’ve included a screenshot of what your Thank You page will look like with multiple texts.

Note — you will not need to make additional pages, just texts.

Step 3: Go into the question editor for one of these descriptive texts and go down to Advanced Logic & Piping.

Step 4: Under the “Show When” logic select when you will show this text, all dependent upon how your survey taker responded to prior answers.

Step 5: Repeat Steps 2 & 3 for your other texts, aka “Thank You” pages.

I’ve created a very simple 1 question survey to show you how this works. You can take it as many times as you would like and see what the different “Thank You pages” show depending on how you answer the question. Check it out here: http://surveygizmo.thank-you-page-example.sgizmo.com

It’s as simple as that! And the great part about it is that you get to record completes, while showing your survey takers different thank you pages depending on how they answered your survey. Stay tuned for more cool tips and tricks!

Advanced Users- If you’d like to do this with more than one question you will need to write a more advanced rule which you can learn how to do using our Advanced Rule Writing tutorial.

So what’s so cool about Majed’s survey? Well, he is catering to an Arab audience and needed to be able to get his text to read from right to left  and have everything written in Arabic fonts.  You’re probably thinking this is going to take him hours and hours of work and he’s pretty much out of luck.  Not to worry! SurveyGizmo can do both of these things with just a few changes to the CSS.  Because we give you the ability to go into the CSS and change things in your survey, all Majed had to do was add a single line to his CSS code and viola! And as for writing in Arabic as long as Majed’s keyboard was set to type Arabic, SurveyGizmo supports displaying the foreign characters properly. How cool is that!?!  Below are a few screen shots of Majed’s beautifully designed and easy to complete survey.

Majed also added some pretty cool show/hide triggers for the questions so his survey takers stay on the same page but only see one question at a time (so as not to overwhelm them). Nice job Majed!

Now let’s check out a survey Jeremy Feinstein from Empsight.com created.  Jeremy had a problem- he needed high level managers to fill out a questionnaire about their employees, but when he created an Excel spreadsheet and handed it out previously, he got a very low response rate.  This time he created it using SurveyGizmo’s Custom Group question type.  This allowed him to add various drop-down and checkbox questions to make a very professional (and much cooler than Excel) looking questionnaire. He also added some show/hide checkboxes at the bottom that allowed the survey takers to dynamically display instructions or job descriptions only when they needed to, without overwhelming them with all the information at once. Check out some screen shots of his survey below!