.

How do you make a user friendly and useful web survey? With all the free online tools available today it seems so easy to just do it. Being highly educated people museum professionals should be able to manage that. But do we know how to do it right? That was the central issue of the Museums and the Web workshop Web Surveys: Don’t just do it. Do it right! facilitated by Silvia Filippini Fantoni from British Museum and Kate Haley Goldman from Institute for Learning Innovation.

Recently I conducted my first web survey using the online tool QuestionPro and I succeeded in making all the classic mistakes: Far too many questions posed in the wrong order, no progress indicator etc. The result: 70 people started taking the survey, and only 19 completed. So I knew I’d be a target user for this workshop.

To my relief, Silvia and Kate stressed that they can’t count the times they’ve corrected museum professionals in making the most basic mistakes. It seems that it’s easy to miss the most obvious points, which is why museums should always pilot test their web surveys before publishing them online. During the workshop the general dos and don’ts of web surveys were highlighted: 

• be short and to the point  
• pose mostly close-ended questions but allow users to elaborate at the end
• be user-oriented – drop the museum-lingo
• integrate skip logic and progress indicator
• make consequent use of question types and rating systems
• place demographics at the end
• warmly welcome and thank the users

A good basic rule is: Questions should only be need-to-have, not nice-to-have. Limit yourself to posing questions that you will actually take action on and drop the questions that you won’t do anything about anyway.

The workshop’s strength was the instant applicability of the advice given. I felt I could go directly back home and make a successful web survey by using the free online tool Survey Monkey that was demonstrated during the workshop. It’s the most used survey tool online, and having seen Silvia’s demonstration of it I was convinced that this tool will be my new survey pal. Easy and intuitive to use, it’s also applicable to paper and pen surveys so you can manage different methodological approaches with a single tool.

Over the last couple of years a certain ‘survey fatigue’ has been spreading, resulting in dropping answer rates due to users being overexposed to web surveys. This makes it even more important to do it right so that museum employees looking for crucial user feedback won’t waste their time and efforts in vain. Users need strong incentives to spend time to fill out our web surveys so we need to be precise in defining what’s in it for the users. An idea that occurred to me during the workshop was to integrate persuasive design principles in web survey design. One of the central principles of PD is exploiting what is referred to as ‘seducible moments’ – the moments when users will actually responsive to your enquiry.

A big question, that was impossible to cover in just a two and a half hour session, is how to interpret survey results correctly. Silvia and Kate stressed the importance of using several survey methods when investigating a topic so you don’t have to rely on just one type of responses that might bias the results you get.

The bottom line is: Web surveys are not hard to do, so just do it. But for your own sake first look into how to do it right.

News
Museums and the Web, MW2010, web surveys