Best
Practices for Creating and Managing Your Surveys
- Prepare your questions before entering them online : It
is always a good idea to draft your survey questions before you start
creating a survey. It will save you a lot of time modifying or correcting
the survey questions after the survey is created. Please note: once
your survey starts taking votes, you may have to delete all existing
survey results if you want to add or delete any questions.
Better yet, you can draft your questions in a text file and then use
Copy and Paste to copy the questions to your survey form.
- Make your questions simple : Keep your questions short and
to the point. Not every one is patient enough to answer essay-style
survey questions.
- Carefully check your survey form : After entering your survey
questions, you have the opportunity to preview your survey form. Please
carefully check all questions and make sure they are presented as
expected. If you see anything wrong, go back and modify the survey
form.
- Test your survey form : It doesn't mean "You are free to
go!" when we say "Your survey form has been created successfully!".
You have an even more important task to do: test and verify that your
survey form is working. Spend a few minutes submitting the survey
form and checking the survey results page and see if the numbers and
bar/pie charts are correct. It never hurts doing a little bit of checking.
Clear the survey results before you invite people to your survey.
- Archive your survey results : Print out the survey results
page (to paper or PDF file) as soon as your survey expires. Download
the raw result data and back it up.
Tips and Hints
- How to do "jump question" : For example, for those who answers
"Yes" to the first question, you want them to skip the second question
and go to the third question. To do this, you can simply add something
like "(if you answer [Yes], please go to Question 3)" at the end of
the first question.
- Automatic Checking : When you enter questions for your survey,
you can take advantage of this small but convenient feature: automatic
checking of radio button or checkbox. For example, when you're entering
a question, the checkbox will be automatically checked when you click
the text field next to the checkbox. The same feature can also be
found elsewhere on the web site. You need to enable your javascript in your browser
in order to use this feature. For most users javascript is turned on by default.
See the following two examples.
- Delete existing survey results if you add/delete any questions/options
: if you don't, you will likely get the "99999" error (or other unusual survey
results) shown below. Reason: questions and answers are saved in a matched manner
and you can't have a question without a corresponding answer or an
answer without a corresponding question.
- Browser and screen resolution : Although this web site works
with any browser on any platform, we recommend that you use Internet
Explorer 5 or above or Netscape 4 or above in a 1024 x 768 screen resolution to achieve the
best visual result.
- Testing your survey : Change your survey setting to [Don't write cookie]
and [Allow multiple submits from one IP address] (see below) so you can test your survey
by submitting more than once. Don't forget to change it back when your survey goes live
if you do want to write cookie and allow only one submit for each IP address.
- "(Please check all that apply)" : If you have a Format B question that allows
multiple answers (checkboxes), adding "(Please select all that apply)" at the end of
this question may help your survey respondents understand that they
can select more than one answer.
Things Not To Do
- Don't skip a question number in your questions. For example,
if you have 10 questions in your survey (question 1 through
10) but forgot to check the checkbox in front of question 5,
then on the surey form you will only see questions 1-4 and 6-10.
SurveyAnywhere will disregard question 6-10 when capturing responses/answers
from survey respondents. Only survey results for questions 1-4
are available to you. Also, "question" is not meant
to be used a a "label", it has to be a question with
one or more options.
|
