Most online survey tools will give you everything you need to create a survey that looks lively enough to keep your audience’s interest, and has the tools necessary to be able to take the information returned and give you an idea of what it all means. The only thing it can’t do for you is come up with the questions. Now that you’ve got the online survey design part down, it’s time to tackle the top three issues around designing survey questions.
1. Asking uninteresting questions. It’s not that you have to make every single question you ask crackle with intrigue, but you can’t ask mundane questions that your participant won’t see the value in.
2. Asking too many questions. You can only test your survey participant’s patience for so long before he or she will say to themselves “That's it, I’ve had enough.” Ask as few questions as possible to get the information you need, but don’t make the survey too short to be useful, either.
3. Saving the best questions for last. Your survey participants might get bored and bail before they’re through answering all the questions, in which case you may want to get to the meat of the matter early on.
Your online survey tools can only get you so far. Remember to put a lot of pre-thought into the kinds of questions that you want answered. With some respondents, you may not get a second chance.