Those who work in market research know time is of the essence as managers and clients are continually pushing projects to be completed as soon as possible. At times your project workload may not seem like a list of high priority to low priority but rather a list of high priority to medium-high priority. However, when it comes to market research and the always moving tasks, nothing may be more important than pre-testing your online survey.
You may have spent weeks designing and constructing your online survey. You may dream about the question sequence and recite the wording in your sleep, but it's still critical to test your survey live before full launch. As a result of spending so much time on the survey you've worked so hard to prepare over the past few weeks, it's safe to say you've probably become engrossed in it. As a result, it's human nature to overlook things a fresh set of eyes could bring to your project.
Pretesting an online survey may extend your project completion date by a few hours, days, or possibly even weeks (in the worst case scenario), but in the end, it's always better than the sending out a survey too hastily. Hindsight is always 20-20. You'll learn about a lot of things through your pretesting and you'll be thankful that you took a deep breath.
Here are 10 benefits of pretesting your online survey:
- Testing to ensure programming logic and routing is working correctly
- Testing for grammar and typos
- Testing to ensure objectives are answered for your manager or client
- Testing to ensure the process works smoothly from invitation through to submission
- Testing to ensure length of survey matches your budget and expectations
- Testing to ensure question comprehension, providing relevant answers for respondents
- Testing to understand response rates, so an estimated full number of invites can be calculated
- Testing to understand incidence rates to qualify respondents
- Testing dropout points in the survey, is there a common questions respondents leave?
- Testing to see if response choices are mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive
Drive Research is an online survey company in Upstate, NY. Question about how the Drive team can assist with you next market research project? Contact us at 315-303-2040 or email our team at [email protected].