Maintaining your online business requires that you understand well the needs of your customers or users visiting your webpage. Developing reliable questionnaires is a great way to identify information that can help you make more knowledgeable decisions. The questions in a survey may come in various formats which can get you an accurate image of your customers and the important issues related to your work.
Types of survey questions
Multiple choice questions:These questions provide given answers, related to the given question. The number of answers may vary depending on your decision. For example, you may want the respondents to select one or more than one answers from a list of options to the question `Which are the most appealing topics for content writing in your opinion?` You should include a category named `other` as users may come up with ideas that you may have not thought about.
Rank Order Questions: Sometimes you would like to know which specific attributes or characteristics are most valued by your users. It can be done through dragging or star rating the chosen items. For example, if you need to know whether podcasts on your website are as useful as the content for your customers you can create a question such as ` please, rate the following`, and providing categories like `podcasts`, `videos` and `posts`.
Open-Ended questions: Look for the qualitative, more comprehensive points of a certain topic or issue. In this case the respondent is free to give a detailed explanation. Open-ended questions are more predictable than most of the other types of questions, though they are time-consuming therefore you should not use them frequently unless you need to clarify ambiguities. Examples of this question format are comments and suggestions provided by users or website visitors.
Miscellaneous Questions: Are designed to collect personal information from users such as name and surname, address, zip code and phone number. Time selection and year range are also displayed for the respondent to choose. Other questions may refer to certain niche functions as `Calendar box`, `File Upload` and `Image question`. These types of questions will help maintain an organized compilation of all survey user data.
Matrix Tables: Similarly to the multiple choice questions, they allow respondents to answer among questions listed to the left and answer choices across the top of page. The format is two-dimensional arranged like a table. There are three types of Matrix Questions: Dropdown Matrix that allowing participants to select one answer per row, Checkbox with multiple answers per row and Spreadsheet Matrix which provides textboxes for freeform input.
There are three kinds of matrix questions: Multi-Point Scales / Dropdown Matrix restricts participants to select one answer per row; Checkbox / Multi-Select Matrix allows multiple answers per row; Spreadsheet Matrix provides entering often numerical data for specific questions. These questions work well when evaluating specific financial amounts. Series of questions in Matrix format may vary from `Poor- Excellent, Disagree- Strongly Agree, or even Not Likely- Very Likely`.
Demographic Questions: are used for identifying characteristics such as age, gender, income, race, geographic place of residence, number of children, and so forth. They may help to differentiate between users and non-users. For instance, you may find out that the greatest number of your customers come from Western Europe, are between age-40-55 and have a similar amount of income.
No matter what question format you will use, you need to keep in mind the goal of the survey, your reasons and hopes for accomplishing it, as well as the way you will use the collected data.
