Writing survey questions
The creation of a question is perhaps the most important part of the survey process that accurately measure the opinions, experiences, and behaviors of the audience. Creating good measures involves both writing good questions and organizing them to form the questionnaire.
There are 6 common types of questions:
1. Open-Ended Questions
An open-ended survey question will ask the respondent to explain their opinion. For example, to get the customer’s opinion on your brand, you could start with a closed-ended question asking how likely a customer is to recommend your brand.
After that, you might consider asking customers to explain their choice like “Why or why wouldn’t you recommend our product to your friends/family?”
Other examples of open-ended questions:
- What other services would you like to see us offer?
- If you could change just one thing about our product, what would it be?
Advantages of open-ended questions
- Open-ended questions help you learn about customer needs you didn’t know existed, and they shine a light on areas for improvement that you may not have considered before. If you limit your respondents’ answers, you can cut yourself off from key insights.
- Open-ended questions are very useful when you first begin surveying your customers and collecting their feedback. If you don't yet have a good amount of insight, answers to open-ended questions will go a long way towards educating you about who your customers are and what they are looking for.
Downsides to open-ended questions
- People tend to be less likely to respond to open-ended questions in general because they take comparatively more effort to answer than, say, a yes/no one.
- Second, but connected: if you ask multiple open-ended questions in a row during your survey, people will get tired of answering them, and their answers might become less and less helpful the more you ask.
- The data you get back from open-ended questions will take longer to clean and analyze compared to easy 1-to-5 or Yes/No answers.
2. Close-Ended Questions
A close-ended survey question gives a limited set of answers. These questions cold be nominal questions, Likert scale questions, rating scale questions, and yes or no questions. Respondents are not allowed to explain their answer and can only choose from the pre-determined options. Asking a variety of questions is important to get the best data.
3. Nominal questions
A nominal question is a type of survey question that presents people with multiple answer choices; the answers are non-numerical in nature and don't overlap (unless you include an ‘all of the above’ option).
Example of nominal question:
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What are you using [product name] for?
1. Business
2. Personal use
3. Both business and personal use
Nominal questions work well when there is a limited number of categories for a given question. They’re easy for people to answer and for you to create graphs and trends from, but the downside is that you may not be offering enough categories for people to reply
Pro tip: you can add an open-ended component to a nominal question with an expandable ’other’ category, where respondents can add in an answer that isn’t on the list. When you do that, you’re essentially asking an open-ended question, because you aren’t limiting them to the options you’ve picked.
4. Likert scale questions
The Likert scale is typically a 5- or 7- point scale that evaluates a respondent’s level of agreement with a statement or the intensity of their reaction towards something.
The scale develops symmetrically: the median number (e.g., a ‘3’ on a 5-point scale) indicates a point of neutrality, the lowest number (always a ‘1’) indicates an extreme view, and the highest number (e.g., a ’5’ on a 5-point scale) indicates the opposite extreme view.
Examples of Likert-type questions:
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How strongly do you agree with the following statement: people express more positive attitudes on social media.
1 - Strongly disagree
2 - Somewhat disagree
3 - Neither agree nor disagree
4 - Somewhat agree
5 - Strongly agree
Pro tip: you can make the scale 0-5 so that there is no neutral point where people usually go to for comfort. When you do that, you’re essentially asking people to choose a pick even if they are unsure. It helps reveal people’s attitudes even if they are only slightly agreeing/disagreeing.
5. Ordinal questions
Rating scale questions are questions where the answers map onto a numeric scale (such as rating customer support on a scale of 1-5, or likelihood to recommend a product from 0 to 10). Whenever you want to assign a numerical value to your survey and/or visualize and compare trends, a rating question is the way to go.
Examples of rating questions:
- How likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague on a scale of 0-10?
- How would you rate our customer service on a scale of 1-5?
6. ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ questions
‘Yes’ and ‘no’ questions are a good way to quickly segment your respondents. For example, say you are trying to understand what obstacles or objections are stopping people from trying your product. You can place a survey on your pricing page, ask people if something is stopping them, and follow-up with the segment who replied ‘NO’ by asking them to elaborate further.
These questions are also great for getting your foot in the door. When you ask a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ question, it requires very little effort to answer. Once a user commits to answering the first question, they tend to become more willing to answer the questions that follow.