Category: Web Surveys

A second screen design issue that Mick Couper and I took up in our GOR paper was Web page size.  Some years back the most common monitor size was 800×600 pixels.  Today we have larger monitors capable of higher resolution, and the most common size now is 1024×768 pixels, with some Web users on even…

As I noted in a previous post, Mick Couper and I have just finished some research where we varied screen background color to see if it made any difference in breakoffs, in respondent perceptions of time to complete, or in their general sense of the survey experience.  We tested three colors: white, blue, and yellow. …

I’ve just come back from Germany and the General Online Research Conference where I presented some research that Mick Couper (ISR) and I did on some very basic Web survey design features: screen size, background color, and placement of the navigation buttons.  More on that later.  For now I simply want to draw attention to…

For some while now I have advocated against the use of drop downs in Web surveys.  That’s been based on a number of things–some research we’ve done with our UM colleagues, an emerging consensus in the usability literature, and my own personal experience.  Benjamin Healey from Massey University in New Zealand has just provided what…

Several years back it was very fashionable to incent Web survey respondents by offering either cash prizes in a sweepstakes or, in B2B studies, executive toys like color printers and PDAs.   These were thought to be effective and were in fact much less expensive than per-complete cash incentives.   Some online panels continue to work on…

I've just read two papers with very similar designs and nearly identical conclusions. (One by Arthur Lugtigheid and Sandra Rathod for Survey Sampling and one by Mirta Galesic at the University of Maryland.)  Both researchers looked at three data quality indicators: time spent answering questions, the percent missing data or DK responses, and the number…

For some time now Web survey designers have recognized that drop-downs are problematic, and so most avoid them.  Web usaiblity guru Jakob Neilsen, who has long railed against them, has once again spoken on the issue.  Below is his verbatim post: Another reason to use drop-down menus sparingly, as I wrote in 2000: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20001112.html Most…

In previous posts I’ve talked about the tendency for respondents in self-administered surveys like Web and mail to choose answers from the top of the answer list, especially if the list is long.  The implication is that respondents are not reading the full list, or at least are putting more cognitive energy into items at…

This is a tough issue.  A client supplies us with an email list of customers, former customers, or prospects with whom he’d like to do research, but he wants it blind so that respondents are not influenced by knowing who is sponsoring the research.  The CASRO code currently requires that we identify in the survey…

In an earlier post (http://regbaker.typepad.com/regs_blog/2006/04/web_users_read_.html)I commented on some research by Jakob Neilsen showing that Web users tend to read the screen in a rough F-shaped pattern.  Shortly thereafter we got some pushback from a client about our standard of the Next button on the left and the Previous button on the right.  This client was…