4 tips for improving online survey creation

Online survey tools like Zoomerang and Surveymonkey make it very easy for just about everyone to launch their own surveys. Whilst this is a good thing, it also means that there are a lot of surveys out there and people are getting survey fatigue. If you manage to persuade someone to do your survey, your next challenge is to make sure that they don’t drop off half way through and actually complete the whole thing. Here are 4 of my top tips for good survey creation:

Too many surveys are poorly thought out and structured and are far too long – this leads to high drop-offs. Before creating your survey, set out your research objectives and then compare your survey against these. Be ruthless about eliminating unnecessary questions. Don’t ask questions you can research using other means (e.g. webstats).

Survey flow is incredibly important. Start with easy, quick questions which help engage your respondent and gets them into the right frame of mind. However, bearing in mind that survey drop-offs tend to happen towards the end of the survey, you need to balance this with getting your most important questions in early.

Structure your questions in such a way that the answer can be given by multiple choice, ratings etc. Only use free response forms if you really have to. This makes it quicker and easier for the user. It also makes it easier for you to analyse and segment the data when you get the results.

Usability is also important. Test your surveys with several people and watch them fill them out. Ask them for commentary. It’s so easy to ignore a potential response (e.g. how many surveys have you completed (or dropped off!) where you want to select n/a but the surveyor has not included this as a possible response)

Best practice website navigation

We were recently asked to review a website for usability. One of the key pieces the client wanted to look at was navigation. Surprisingly, there’s not a huge amount available on the web about this. Even Jakob Nielsen, the guru of website usability is pretty quiet on the subject. So we pulled together a few thoughts and rules of thumb when it comes to creating a good website navigation:

Website users go to websites with goals in mind and perform tasks in order to achieve these goals. Information seeking is one of the most common goals on websites and especially intranets. Navigation is the primary tool for in-site information seeking. A good navigation makes for fast and successful information seeking.

Website navigation has undergone much standardisation over the years. Navigation bars, drop-down menus and sub-navigations are found across most sites, as are standard labels such as “home”, “about”, “contact us”, etc. Users sub-consciously expect sites to adhere to these standards. If sites don’t follow these standards, information seeking can be greatly impaired.

Secondary navigations (not to be confused with sub-navigations) are often missed and confuse users as to the categorisation, structure and priority of information presented.

Navigation labels should use concise and common language as this aids information seeking. Jargon should be avoided.

If you’ve got any any other navigation tips to add, please drop us a comment.

Another superb blog post – or why you should avoid big claims

Internet and intranet sites with news on their front pages often feature short introductions to the articles. Readers are then expected to click through and read the full text. 

It follows that writers and editors need to make these introductory blurbs or teasers as enticing as possible, to encourage click-throughs. 

Like any advertisement, your blurb can either show people why they should read on, or it can tell them. 

Showing would mean describing what they’ll find when they click through. Telling might mean assuring the reader it will be worth their time. 

Telling might involve saying “this fascinating article…” is “unmissable” … “essential reading” … “a scoop”.  

Telling people why they need to read your article can be highly effective, but is hazardous for the following reasons: 

1) People might not believe your blurb. Readers are used to big claims about what they’ll find when they click a link, and may treat them with scepticism. 

2) You risk inflating the language. If you describe an article as “essential”, how are you going to describe the next article and still hold your readers’ attention? “More essential”? 

3) You risk disappointing the reader, thereby diminishing your future credibility. If the reader decides an article you told them is wonderful is in fact a woeful mess, they’re less likely to believe other claims on your site. 

The bottom line? Use big claims sparingly. Show people why they might be interested in your post more often than telling them they will be. 

You can read more about blurbs on this weblog here. 

And there’s good advice from Poynter here. 

An argument in favour of taxonomy

We’ve been talking about the usefulness (or otherwise) of taxonomy in automated content management at Content Formula recently.

At its most basic level, taxonomy allows pieces of content to appear in the most relevant sections of a site.

For example if the Financial Times wanted to publish an article about a European government bailing out an energy firm with a big complex loan, the editor might decide to make the content appear in three different sections of the site – Europe, Finance, and Energy. Instead of publishing it three times, he simply needs to tag it correctly for it to appear in the three sections.

Among the disadvantages of taxonomy are that it can be over-complex where simplicity is required. And when you create a taxonomy it must mean something to the reader, and ultimately must speed his or her journey to the information they’re looking for. Creating meaningful (semantic) taxonomies isn’t always easy.

But this sentence from Nielsen’s Alertbox today is a great argument in favour of using taxonomy to make sure content can be found in the right place, at least in a big intranet:

“…at JPMorgan Chase, the intranet homepage is viewed 620,000 times per day, so even one superfluous headline that required one second to scan would cost the company the equivalent of 22 full-time employees in lost productivity.”

The rest is here.

David Harbottle

New draft of web accessibility guidelines

New Media Knowledge (NMK) reports that the second edition of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines are in preparation and a draft version has been released.

The guidelines are intended to help web developers and content creators make their sites as accessible to visitors with disabilities (for example the partially-sighted) as they are to anybody else.

NMK has plenty of nice things to say about the new guidelines, praising the fact that they use real-life examples and list common failures.

But they also rightly criticise the “verbose and jargon-filled language”, the excessive use of links, and the sheer quantity of material. What webmaster in their right minds is going to read something over five hundred pages long, not to mention the pages of annexes and additional material on the W3C site?

Website accessibility is a good aim. So far it hasn’t been put into practice by the vast majority of site owners. The complexity of the guidelines is one reason for this, and this second edition seems likely to take us no further forward.

David Harbottle

How can writing effective headlines and blurbs help visitors navigate your site?

Whether you run a public website or a secure intranet, you’re likely to use headlines to get people moving around the site and clicking through to other sections or pages. There are several reasons why it’s worth spending a little thought on them.

• As a navigation aid, explaining what the reader can expect to find when they click on the headline
• To entice the reader to click through, and use the site to the maximum
• To improve the number of hits from search engines
• To retain the design and balance of the page

But it’s difficult to measure the effect of good headlines in a systematic way, and as a result the usability gurus offering tips don’t necessarily agree in every respect. Very often, then, your judgement is based on experience and gut feeling.

Having said that, here’s some advice from Jakob Nielsen that’s worth considering:

• Headlines should be written in plain language: no puns, no “cute” or “clever” headlines
• No teasers that try to entice people to click to find out what the story is about
• Skip leading articles like “the” and “a”
• Make the first word an important, information-carrying one

And from Poynter, some tips on writing effective blurbs:

• They’re an aid to navigation, but readers only skim them
• Blurbs encourage reading and scrolling on homepages, but don’t necessarily encourage clickthroughs
• People focus primarily on the left third of the text in blurbs – get the keywords in that area

David Harbottle