A New Way of Asking the Same Question

In the day and age where online surveys have become quite common, there is always a need to keep respondents engaged in the survey process. As you can see in this recent Quirk’s article “How Web 2.0 Made a Long Survey More Palatable,” by Amy Hebard from earthsense, the need to balance getting the information you need and keeping respondents from feeling fatigued is a very big challenge. In this article Amy speaks about how they utilized the latest Web 2.0 techniques in order make sure the respondent enjoys their survey taking experience.

In our own search to keep our audience engaged, we have come across several visual survey formats that allow the ability to ask standard types of questions but in an innovative and captivating way. Take for example Vision Critical’s survey tool within their Sparq online community platform. You can see a full range of abilities they offer in their Respondent Experience product demo, but some interesting capabilities it offers include:

• Ranking by just dragging text or images on the screen into buckets
• Visual marking up of images or pictures and then commenting on the highlighted area
• Other visual type questions such as ordering images to rank and sliders for allocating points or money

Another interesting survey I recently came across is by Ionz. When you go to their site (you must click on the British flag in the right corner for English), an extremely engaging survey pops up. Below are a few screenshots of some questions. You can check out their website to see the full survey.

Instead of the normal radio button question for gender, Ionz used figures of a man and woman that move as you mouse over them.

Another interesting concept they used is displaying other respondent’s answers after you have selected your answer to the question.

Have you come across any interesting examples of using Web 2.0 features to make the survey experience even better? I would love to see them!!!!