Bad Survey = Useless Results (Let me roast your survey)
A major part of my job is writing and editing surveys to validate and develop ideas. I know how important a survey can be for data collection and decision making.
I've recently been looking at a bunch of surveys validating a product idea on here, twitter, linkedin, etc. I don't actually finish a lot of these surveys because something is off; I'll get the idea behind the questions, but usually the execution isn't right. That bothers me because I don't want to answer a survey that won't actually give someone the answers they're looking for (or it might give them the answers, but they're deceiving).
At the end of the day, if you're not framing questions in the right way, your results will be misleading and even meaningless. If you're using a survey as validation or to make major decisions, it could waste a lot of your time and money.
So, if you're running a survey and don't have much experience: let me help you!
If you send me two things:
- Your goal for the survey (aka what you're trying to achieve and get out of it)
- The actual survey (please no surveys more than 15 questions)
I'll send back ways you can improve your survey so you get the results you need.
If you have any questions about best practices, shoot em my way too! (@tzeying and I have also written an article about writing surveys here too: http://bit.ly/378nY2D, but happy to answer any questions as well!)
FYI I'm in Singapore, so if you post and I don't respond - I'm probably sleeping at the moment
Cool! I know your proposal is to respond one-on-one, but I'm sure it'd be useful to lots of people to see you write up a general purpose guide or two on surveying users.
We actually have / are in continuously in the process of doing so! I linked one of them at the bottom of my post: http://bit.ly/378nY2D
We published it on here too before we created our own blog page! :)(https://www.indiehackers.com/article/how-to-write-a-survey-when-you-know-nothing-5ec001d986)
Hi Ali - I eagerly await more of your articles on survey writing, but can you recommend any current reading/courses I can do to get enough knowledge to get most of the way there in say 4-8 hours. I actually have access to some "big books" on the topic and I'll read them if I have to but it'll take me a few weeks and they are for professional researchers.
Hey - honestly there are a lot of articles out there on survey writing, especially on the major platforms like surveymonkey, qualtrics, typeform, etc. You could spend a lot of time just jumping to different platforms and reading their how-tos; I can't say I've actually read a lot of them thoroughly though.
I think of the examples I have read, I really like hotjar's how-to. It's pretty comprehensive and still a good short read: https://www.hotjar.com/blog/survey-questions/#70-survey-question-examples.
Most of what I've learned was through experience / working with my colleagues. The articles I've been writing have been heavily influenced by how I'm now teaching new colleagues. (I linked the "How to write surveys for beginners" previously: http://bit.ly/378nY2D, but i also just published a new one on "how to get survey responses for free": http://bit.ly/37PAIeO)
I'm happy to answer any questions you have as well.
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Hi! We're actually doing something very similar right now on twitter! Happy to help out anyways I can. Feel free to pm me whenever :)
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Oh, whoops. I definitely don't have that in there. Add me on LinkedIn : https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexandria-grimaldi-92b30968/ or twitter instead: https://twitter.com/aligrimaldi :)