Survey Design 101 - How to optimise Diggle for surveys
This is an easy and straigthforward guide for anyone looking to create effective and engaging surveys using Diggle. Whether you’re a beginner or an experienced survey designer, these insights will enhance your approach to survey creation and help you achieve meaningful results. This design works well for conducting market research, gathering employee feedback, exploring academic topics, and so much more. Essentially, this guide will walk you through the key steps to design a survey that yields valuable insights. Feel free to check out one of our ready-made templates for inspiration!
- What do you want to know?
The first step is to define what you are trying to achieve with your survey. If you do not have clear goals, it can be hard to get the insight you are looking for. Every question or task in your survey should contribute to achieving your goal or answer the question you set out to explore. If a question or task does not match your goal, skip it.
- Choose an appropriate method.
What kind of survey are you opting for? Are you looking for feedback, or do you intend to explore something? Your chosen method will set the framework for what type of questions you should ask and what kind of question types you should use.
- Always keep participants in the loop.
Remember to let your participants know the purpose of they survey. This can easily be done by including a survey introduction as the first slide in your Diggle. The introduction should include who is distributing the survey, the intention of the survey, how long it will take, whether the survey is anonymous, and other relevant information.
- A good survey should be tailored.
Consider your target group. Who are the participants you are aiming for? This step is similar to step one; you should always know who you are reaching out to and what characterizes them. Keep important details like demographics and other attributes in mind when designing your survey.
- Variety is key.
In order to keep participants interested and to make your survey a little extraordinary, opt for various question types and items. Whether you are looking to collect numbers and statistics, or text and feedback, Diggle offers several different question types that can benefit your purpose.
- Avoid leading questions.
If you are looking for results that are representative and honest, opting for open and closed questions that fit the purpose of your survey will likely aid you. Closed questions make it easier to create graphs and charts, and simplifies comparison and analysis. Open questions are great if you are looking to learn more about opinions, experiences, thoughts, and beliefs. Remember that open questions often take longer to answer, which should be considered when designing the survey.
- Consider the order of your questions.
A good rule of thumb is to place “boring questions” at the very end of the survey (i.e., age, gender etc). Even though structure is key, these questions are pretty standard and do not really give off a good or bad impression so you might as well place them at the end. If any questions are designed to take longer to respond to or require more effort from the participants’ side, place these first. However, don’t start off with questions that are too difficult – let the respondents ease into it.
- Specificity is your friend.
Make sure that there is limited room for interpretation in your formulations. Be specific and straight to the point, and keep language simple and humane. Making questions simple and understandable makes participants more likely to answer the whole survey and not loose interest quickly. Feel free to use one of our ready-made templates for inspiration!
- Run a pre-test.
Pre-testing your survey is always a good idea as it gives a good indication of whether questions are understandable and specific, and that your chosen question types serve their purpose. It is also an excellent opportunity for you to practice being a Diggle-facilitator. Your test subjects doesn’t have to be participants from your target group – it can be friends, family, or co-workers.