Writing effective surveys

Service Design User research
1

The Digital Service Toolkit is missing guidance on writing surveys.

We’ve had a few requests for this recently, so let’s do something about it.

What activities, resources, rules or advice can you share that should be in whole-of-government guidance on surveys?

2

You can also share your specific needs or challenges here for the community to address!

3

Here’s a great resource (care of @jennifer.weiley) on using plain English

4

We have this contribution from @SunjooKim which can help with some principles of good survey design, such as:

  • how to run the product/market fit survey
  • how to analyse the results to validate the fit
  • how to leverage the data

Thanks Sunjoo!

5

Some good resources care of a Principal service designer at DCS:

Why we shouldn’t do surveys in government

And this gem from Mind the Product (care of Atlassian)
TL;DR
To do better surveys:

  • Use qualitative techniques before quantitative: do interviews or contextual enquiry before you design a survey
  • Triple test your survey: make sure people understand questions consistently and are able to answer accurately
  • Use humans to analyse words: don’t rely on automated text analysis. Read the feedback.