Tag: Questionnaire Design
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Thinking fast and slow in web survey design
I am a huge fan of Jakob Nielsen's work on web usability. He has a post out this week–"Four Dangerous Navigation Approaches that Can Increase Cognitive Strain"–that puts web usability into a system 1/system 2 framework. As I've said many times before, I believe that his research on web usaiblity has important implications for web…
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Faster is better
It’s the college basketball season and that means yours truly is spending way too much time in front of his TV. One of the more annoying commercials that gets repeated over and over is this one by AT&T, driving home the message that faster is better. At least on your iPhone. It’s a sort of…
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Measuring the right stuff
A few weeks back I saw a post by online usability specialist Jakob Nielsen titled, “User Satisfaction vs. Performance Metrics.” His finding is pretty simple: Users generally prefer designs that are fast and easy to use, but satisfaction isn't 100% correlated with objective usability metrics. Nielsen looked at results from about 300 usability tests in…
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Norman doors and online questionnaire design
In usability circles the doors in the pictures on the right are called “Norman doors.” Their named for Donald Norman who wrote a fascinating little book called, The Design of Everyday Things. In the book Norman talks a great deal about affordances, that is, properties of objects that help us to do things with them. …
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Plus ça change – Part 2
Back in December I wrote the first of two posts noting the way in which some trends in our industry can rise and fall and then rise up again with all of the same promise, problems and fears. I noted the way in which the issues surround CRM and data mining seem to be having…
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Thinking or just plain stumped?
Last night I had dinner with an old friend who also is a world renowned and widely published expert on questionnaire design. We chatted some about what's happening in MR and I asked for his take on the industry's obsession with speeders, i.e., respondents we decide have answered questions too quickly. Or, more specifically, does…
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Can we really do two things at once?
Like most research companies mine now routinely includes cell phones in our telephone samples. Best practice requires that before we interview someone on a cell phone we determine if it's safe to do the interview. If, for example, the respondent is driving a car we don't do the interview. Yesterday someone asked me if it…
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Getting to the bottom of the respondent engagement problem
I've been working along with some colleagues on the lit review section of a paper for the ESOMAR Congress. The topic is "gamification" as the next experiment designed to increase respondent engagement in online surveys. As anyone who has done their homework knows the issue of survey respondent engagement did not arise with the growth…
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HSRM – Day 2 AM
There is a bit of a cloud over the conference this morning. A number of the papers were written by and to be presented by government people who could not travel yesterday because of the potential government shutdown. So people from the contractor side are taking up the slack and delivering the government papers. The…
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Words trump pictures in Web surveys
Mick Couper really likes pictures. He not only takes a lot of them he also has had an ongoing interest in how incorporating pictures into Web surveys affects how people answer questions. Way back in 2004 he and his colleagues showed that the frequency with which respondents reported certain types of events (shopping, going to…