Keep Online Surveys Short
User-interface guru Jakob Nielson's latest Alertbox column pleads with marketing managers to Keep Online Surveys Short. It's also good advice for internal communicators:
One goal beats all others when designing a customer survey for a website: maximize the response rate. Low response rates can create actively misleading survey findings because they're likely to be based on a biased sample of your most committed users as opposed to most users (who have better things to do than take your survey). [...] How can you get average users to respond? The highest response rates come when surveys are quick and painless. And the best way to reduce users' time and suffering is to reduce the number of questions. [...] Survey bloat is a natural consequence of having a diverse group of marketing managers, all of whom want customer feedback on their special issues. Please resist the temptation to collect all the information that anybody could ever want. You will end up with no information (or misleading information) instead.