5 Tips for Designing Surveys for Mobile Devices

Research Method Evolution

Over the years, the field of market research has evolved from people giving face-to-face interviews to gather data to primarily using phone interviews, to email, to online surveys. Now, we’re seeing an emergence of mobile research and thus the need for designing surveys for mobile devices. More of the academic research is focusing on the viability of mobile research, including response rates across various age groups, and the efficacy of mobile as a medium for collecting market research data.

On June, 30th, 2016, 11am PST, QuestionPro has an upcoming webinar – How Mobile Innovation is Changing the Face of Data Intelligence,  – Register Here.  Christina Trampota, Mobile Marketing Professor at San Francisco State University and Mark Salsberry, President of QuestionPro CX, will deep-dive into mobile as the marketing measurement and data collection platform. Whether you are a researcher contemplating or already undertaking mobile data collection, this webinar will provide a holistic view of current and future opportunities as mobile and cross-platform research methods continue to evolve.

Surveys for Mobile Devices

But it doesn’t stop there. In order to take advantage of mobile research, your surveys will also need to adjust for this trend of mobile research. Our webinar speakers will cover this during the webinar. But here are 5 quick tips so you can already start creating better surveys for mobile devices.

1. Keep your surveys super-focused. In order to perform well, surveys for mobile devices need to be short, to-the-point, easy to understand, and avoid lengthy questions.
2. Use question types that are easy to interact with on a mobile device. Drag and drop ranking will do better on a mobile device than the traditional ranking question where you have to type in your ranking options. A drop-down menu might do better than a long list of radio buttons for a question where you need to select one answer. A star-rating or smiley-face rating question will also engage a mobile audience more than a traditional 5-point radio button rating question.
3.  Use logic to be sure that your respondents are only seeing questions that are relevant to them. For example, if you have a multiple choice question where respondents are choosing products or brands they’ve interacted with, this is a great time to use extraction for follow-up questions so that they can avoid seeing questions about their experiences with products or brands they already told you they didn’t use.
4. Keep open-ended text questions to a minimum. Only ask them when absolutely necessary. A survey full of open-ended text questions can be tedious on a mobile device.
5. Last, but not least, make sure your questions and answers are short and to the point. Mobile users are not likely to read lengthy survey introductions or questions. So keep those questions and answers short and easy to understand.

What does this mean for your research today