So it's official. Online surveys bore people. Two things confirmed this for me today. First, my colleague Helen was sent a particularly badly written online survey, and then I read of a report from Engage Research and Global Market Institute, which shows that people have become bored with the format of traditional online surveys. Helen's experience was probably typical of many of those who responded. She received the questionnaire and started answering it, only to get bored by the layout, types of questions used and by the complexity of the questions themselves. So she stopped, abandoned the questionnaire, and became yet another statistic in the history of non-completions in market research.
The purpose of the study from Engage Research and GMI was to investigate why people drop out of online surveys. They examined the drop-out rates from over 550 surveys and then correlated these with survey length and question formats. They then asked a sample of 200 online panelists what frustrated them most about online questionnaires. Finally, they compared static HTML questionnaires and those using flash; and traditional question formats and more traditional ones.
The research showed that as boredom sets in, respondents speed up the rate at which they answer questions. Few responses are given and the quality of those that are dips. There is an increase of pattern answering and of people straight-lining - choosing all responses from one end of a scale (an easier way to respond to questionnaires). Respondents are getting bored with online surveys, and quality is suffering as a result.
So how do we make the most of respondents and get them to respond to our questionnaires online? Respondents to the survey said that relevance of subject matter and an interest in the questions were influential in deciding whether they would complete a survey or not. The format and structure of the questions themselves also matter. Many people drop out within the first five minutes of an online survey. Grid questions cause 80% more drop-out than any other question format.
So respondents are getting bored of online surveys. They no longer have the enthusiasm to spend on complex questionnaires or on subjects they are not interested in. The novelty really has run off and agencies are finding it more difficult than ever to get responses.
What can we do in this environment? Like many situations when the web has been used to change a process, people initially took an old process and just delivered it online. A script that might previously have been conducted by telephone was put online. As with many other examples of developing a process or product online, this really missed out on the real opportunities.
Taking surveys and conducting them online has sometimes resulted in longer and more complex surveys. Once the novelty of the online experience moved on, respondents grew bored of these surveys and it will soon become more difficult to conduct surveys online in this way. What we should be doing instead is thinking of ways in which the online experience can really enhance and augment the online research process. This is where developments in social media and online communities can really come to the fore. Rather than just offering a new way of transmitting the same questionnaire, online research communities offer a real way to do something different. Making the most of social media tools to engage people and to explore their attitudes, beliefs, behaviours and responses. Developments must be in this area, and we will probably see fewer cases of stand-alone online surveys in the future.
If respondents are getting bored of completing online surveys we just need to engage them more.
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Some more reading
- Market Research with a Twist
- Online Surveys for Money - Things to Remember to be Successful
- Telephone research must stop. Full stop.
- Online surveys bore respondents and damage data quality
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