How do you design a survey that is innovative and creative?

I would add more about your goal of your survey. For instance, if it is understanding a recent transaction, questions assessing overall satisfaction or if there were issues with the process will provide you valuable information while questions such as likelihood to recommend (the question associated with net promoter score) should be used for more relational assessments.

Make sure you understand the language your audience uses. The results of your survey will be flawed if you use different language than survey takers. Also beware that of organizational terms creeping in which survey takers are unfamiliar with.

Knowing your audience goes deeper than just selecting a target group. Users might misinterpret what you have written or ascribe different meaning than you intended. To mitigate this, make sure to get extensive feedback on your survey FROM your target audience before launching.

Think of your project like a journey. First, decide what you want to achieve "that's your goal". It could be learning something new or solving a problem. Next, know your audience, the people you want to connect with. Just like speaking their language, understanding what they like and need makes your project more meaningful. When your goals match what your audience cares about, your journey becomes purposeful and successful.

Before diving into questions, define your goals and target audience. This clarity guides the entire survey. Want to gauge customer satisfaction? Simple rating scales or NPS questions might be ideal. Exploring user preferences? Ranking or CBC questions can help. Understanding user behavior? Scenario or task analysis questions are the way to go. Align your survey format, length, tone, and content with your goals and audience for the most impactful results.

Imagine your questions are tools in a toolbox. To build a comprehensive understanding, use different types and formats in your survey. Multiple-choice questions are like a checklist, making it easy to gather specific information. Open-ended questions are like a treasure hunt, revealing unique insights. Rating scales let people express opinions on a scale, providing a nuanced view. Mix and match these question tools to capture a variety of perspectives. It's like using a diverse set of tools to build a well-crafted project, ensuring you gather the right details in the most effective way.

Whole varied questions are more "fun" for the participant, it's critical to never include needless questions. The shorter the survey, the better the response quality. Furthemore, the effort needed to complete your survey should match participant compensation (financial or emotional). With some sampling providers I found that open-ended questions worked amazingly well (prolific), with others they were left blank by 90% of respondents.

For a creative and innovative survey, ditch the monotony! Utilize diverse question types that align with your goals and audience. Open-ended questions unlock detailed feedback, while closed-ended options quantify opinions. Matrix questions compare multiple items, and slider questions capture subtle nuances. To truly engage respondents, incorporate visuals! Images showcase product features, videos illustrate scenarios, emojis express emotions, and icons represent categories. This creative blend of formats and visuals entices participation and leads to richer insights.

Make your survey feel like a conversation by adding interactivity and personal touches. Think of it as customizing the experience for each participant. Include dynamic elements, such as interactive sliders, images, or videos, to keep respondents engaged. Personalize the survey by using their names or tailoring questions based on their previous responses. This not only makes the survey more enjoyable but also shows participants that their input matters. It's like creating a unique, interactive journey for each person, turning a survey into a personalized and engaging experience.

Keep it simple! When a survey is too long or too wordy, your audience will lose focus. An interactive survey will also result in favorable feedback.

This is critical not just for fun, but for good survey design! Never ask more questions than neccessary and never aks questions that are irrelevant to the user. Good logic and branching allows you to dive deeper into certain topics for certain subgroups of participants. For example, in a survey about photography, you can ask more detailed questions to exports than to hobbyists.

Interactivity and personalization elevate your survey from static to engaging. Logic and branching tailor the experience, showing or hiding questions based on responses, guiding users through relevant sections. Piping and variables add a personal touch. Greet respondents by name, reference their choices, or customize the survey based on demographics, location, or device use. This interactive and personalized approach boosts engagement and fosters a more meaningful survey experience.

Testing and optimizing your survey is super important to make sure it works well and gets good answers. First, try it out with a small group of people to see if there are any problems or confusing parts. Ask them for feedback on how to make it better. Then, make any changes you need to based on what they say. Next, test it again to see if the changes helped. Keep doing this until your survey is easy to understand and gives you the info you need. Testing and fixing your survey helps make sure you get the best results from the people taking it.

Don't launch untested! Ensure your innovative creation is also clear, relevant, and unbiased. Utilize preview mode, send it to a test group, or leverage tools like SurveyMonkey Genius. Optimize by checking for errors, maintaining consistent language and formatting, and avoiding leading questions. Clear instructions and response options are key. Finally, optimize length by setting a limit, consider a progress bar to boost engagement, and always express gratitude to your respondents.

The best practice is to run a survey with ~20 participants users and ask for extensive feedback after each sections. ~20 participants will immidiately reveal any odd patterns in your responses. Depending on participant quality, you'll also find most of the major issues via this sample. Additionally, this allows you to test out all the technical aspects, such as logic, branching, URL parameters and response recording.

Before visualising your data, check your data quality and filter out troll/malicious/bot responses. There will ALWAYS be participants who are not taking your survey in good faith and providing skewed or troll responses. The best practice is to include a few attention checks in the survey, as well as to filter our participants with extremely unlikely response patterns (for example answering 1 out of 5 to a question and its reverse coded counterpart). It's always good to have an open-ended question in your survey, as bots and troll users will be instantly visible through their low-quality, nonesensical open-ended responses. In some cases up to 25% of your sample can be low-quality-respondents, so always check your data before analysis!

Be cautious with the types of charts you use to visualize your data. For instance, if you have a pie chart do not use more than 4-5 "slices" because you do not want to overwhelm your audience. A good rule is each chart has at most 8 seconds before the audience will move onto other items in your deck or presentation. So make certain to only show the most interesting items.

Once responses are collected, data analysis unlocks the story. Choose methods (descriptive statistics, hypothesis testing, etc.) and tools based on your goals and audience. Visualizations like charts, graphs, and dashboards bring your findings to life. Pie charts showcase proportions, bar charts highlight comparisons, line charts track changes, and dashboards present key metrics – all leading to impactful insights.

The final act of your creative survey journey is sharing the extracted insights. Utilize reports, presentations, blogs, or social media to reach stakeholders, clients, or your audience. Storytelling – narratives, anecdotes, or quotes – can make your findings resonate. But don't stop there! Use these insights to inform decisions, strategies, and actions. Improve offerings, identify opportunities, measure impact – the possibilities are endless. By following these steps, your innovative survey design can become a springboard for positive change.

In nearly all cases I agree! However, if you are working on more difficult topics longer surveys might be more necessary. In those cases think about if it should be a survey or another form of data collection method or if you cannot alter the method consider incentives or extremely ridge methods of sample selection.

Make it short! You're likely to get better results from two 5 question surveys than a 10 question survey. Does your question take 30 minutes to complete? Get it down to 15.