How to design a survey

This page outlines tips on how to design a survey, and the processes we follow to ensure that survey design is successful.

Tips for designing your survey

1. Clear, attainable goal for your survey.

A clear, attainable goal could guide your question design and prioritize the top questions you want to ask.

Instead of a goal like:”I want to better understand customer satisfaction.” Your goal should be like:”I want to understand the key factors that are leading our customers to leave—whether these reasons are caused by internal or external forces.”


2. Keep the more personal questions to the end.

Just like daily conversations, you’d engage in a small talk first, and gradually move on to more personal topics. Similarly, keep your early set of questions light and straightforward, and then slowly move towards more personal questions.


3. Focus on using closed-ended questions.

Closed-ended questions use pre-populated answers choices for the respondents to choose from—like multiple choice or checkbox questions.

When asking closed-ended questions, the choice of options provided, how each option is described, the number of response options offered, and the order in which options are read can all influence how people respond.

In most circumstances, the number of answer choices should be kept to a relatively small number - just four or perhaps five at most. Psychological research indicates that people have a hard time keeping more than this number of choices in mind at


4. Keep your answer choices balanced.

Using answer choices that lean a certain way can result in respondents providing inauthentic feedback.

For instance:”How helpful or unhelpful were our customer service representatives”

A set of unbalanced answer choices (that lean towards being too positive) could look like this:

  1. Very helpful
  2. Helpful
  3. Neither helpful nor unhelpful

Here’s how they’d look once balanced:

  1. Very helpful
  2. Helpful
  3. Neither helpful nor unhelpful
  4. Unhelpful
  5. Very unhelpful


5. Don’t let your survey get too long.

A not-too-long survey will give a higher completion rate as well as more thoughtful responses for the questions you end up including.


6. Preview your survey before you send it.

To prevent any mishaps in your survey design, preview your survey or share it with others so they can catch any mistakes you might not find on your own.