How to address common survey usability issues?

Usability refers to how users interact with a research instrument vs. how they understand it. Here’re 3 issues related to lengthy survey questions and how to address them to improve user experience and data accuracy:

1. Double bank a long list. This encourages users to look at all of the list because it’s visible without having to scroll.
2. Consider between check-all-that-apply and forced choice format. The latter has the user check yes/no for each row and it mitigates data missingness. The former is less burdensome for certain question types, such as all states ever lived – it’s unlikely that many people have lived in many states.
3. Think mobile! Questions like a grid that work on desktop would require zooming/scrolling on mobile. While most off-the-shelf web surveys are mobile-optimized, question-specific variants like the length of text may lead to surprise – so test and retest usability issues!

SEE ALSO:

How to refine skip patterns in a questionnaire?

How to design questions that capture the right information?

What to do before pretesting data collection instruments?

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