There’s nothing worse than a survey that goes on to have useless data. Time, effort, and money put into something with absolutely no output for your business. It’s obvious enough that this should be heavily avoided. What is less obvious are the exact ways in which to do that?
Obvious mistakes are of course worth mentioning. Make sure to keep data backed up, run tests, and lead an unbiased study. Yet something that is often neglected is the coding of a survey. Most surveys today are happening online, and this can be a great tool. Yet it can also be a big hindrance to those who are inexperienced.
Self-service tools exist and are helpful, but without any idea of what’s going on their use will be limited. Big companies exist that will take over the whole process, but that sacrifices autonomy. In the perfect world every survey would be hand coded perfectly, but it’s simply not that easy.
So what is one to do? There are a range of options. Training and experience are a given, these take time but are investments into the future. Exporting work can also be great, especially when it’s only one aspect of survey creation that is challenging. There are also companies that work more side by side instead of hands off.
IncQuery, for example, will do live coding and work more directly with survey creators. This can be preferable at times to bigger companies who work iteratively. The ultimate goal though is just to have a good survey. No matter how it’s done, this will require strong code. So whenever making a survey, make sure that it’s made right. The cost will be worth the benefit of a quality survey.
