One of the largest online video game companies uses Alchemer to study images for upcoming games. You can find Alchemer working for gaming companies in the form of website intercepts and embeds, in-product embeds, collecting customer satisfaction and NPS ratings, conducting traditional market research, and helping with game development. 

Hardcore Gamers and Heatmaps 

Hardcore gamers are easy to find but difficult to survey. Working with our panels team, the creative team at one of the largest online game companies surveyed almost 5,000 serious gamers in four of the biggest esports countries worldwide.  

The survey they ran to see how people perceived different visual elements included a heatmap question. We recreated a simplified version of the heatmap question to show you how you could use heatmap questions in your surveys. 

Application Beyond Games 

Heatmaps are a great way to have people tell you what they like, don’t like, find appealing, find appetizing, find heartwarming, and more. Here are a few uses. 

• Website designers can see where people think they should click. 
• Advertisers can see why some ads perform better than others.  
• Retailers can test different styles, accessories, colors, and more in different markets.  
• Graphic designers can see how people react to different parts of a logo or visual. 
• Fashion designers can see what people think of different accessories, stitching, and more. 
• Game illustrators can see which weapons are considered powerful, deadly, and weak. 

Adding Heatmaps to Your Next Survey 

You will need a Full Access license to ask heatmap questions. First, select the images you want to study, then decide what you want to measure. For our survey, we found three stock images (although custom art from your team is obviously much better). Then we measured what people thought was stylish and what they considered powerful. 

As you can see, it’s easy for respondents to select the part they find best represents stylish and powerful. The results show where people saw what you were asking about (stylish or powerful). As you can see, certain areas were clearly more powerful than others.  

Meanwhile, the parts considered stylish were much more open to interpretation than the elements deemed powerful. You can also test the questions you ask to see what will give you the most useful results. The results would have shown very different heatmaps if we asked about powerful and menacing.  

The beauty of the heatmap question type is that you can focus the feedback on what you want. We asked for stylish or powerful. We could have asked for cute and heartwarming, but we might have needed another set of images. Perhaps kittens and puppies. 

To learn more about heatmap questions, investigate our documentation here. 

If you’re more of a visual learner, the Building Advanced Questions Program in Alchemer University (which is free to any subscriber) has sections on defining, identifying use cases, building, and ready data from heatmap questions. You can find Alchemer University inside your Alchemer account.  

The post Uncovering Visual Cues with Heatmaps appeared first on Alchemer.

How can collecting your audiences’ true feelings about your products or their experience with your brand become as easy as landing on your home page?  

The simplest way to gain insight into your audience and customers is to meet people where they use your products and services every day. Whether that’s within an application or a website, Alchemer makes it simple to survey your audience where they use you the most! We’ll unpack how to embed your Alchemer projects and workflows in the sites your customers are in each day. 

The Building Blocks 

There are a few key items one needs to be successful in embedding an Alchemer project on your site, or anywhere that one has access to custom scripting, such as a web or mobile product. We’ll list these below: 

1. A Collaborator license or higher within the Alchemer Platform. 
2. A complete survey/project build, ready to be distributed and collect responses.
3. A website, or a web or mobile product.
4. Access to custom scripting on the website or in-product. You may need to loop in with your technology or web teams to get this done. 

The Four Types of Embeds with Alchemer 

Alchemer offers four different options for embedding a survey on a website or in-product. Depending on your environment and use case, each offers a similar experience of adding survey functionality! Alchemer offers: 

1. HTML Embed 
2. iFrame Embed 
3. JavaScript Embed 
4. Website Pop-up 

Loop in with your web or technology teams as necessary to understand which option is the best fit for your needs.  

Say we want to include our survey project on the first page of our website, where respondents can fill out a questionnaire and once completed. It will still need the same website experience as the rest of your site. In our example below, we will focus on utilizing and implementing a JavaScript embed. The JavaScript embed option is fantastic for many reasons, but the biggest benefit is that it will inherit the styling of your website, and once a response is completed, respondents will remain on your website, as opposed to leaving the site from an HTML embed. Additionally, the survey project will automatically identify mobile survey taking and style itself to provide a clean experience on a variety of devices. 

The JavaScript Embed 

Our survey example is a general event feedback solution where we are collecting information on general satisfaction. After our survey is completely built out to our liking, let’s go ahead and navigate to the Share tab: 

On the share tab you’ll scroll down to the source tracking section, and select the Embedded Survey option within the On Your Website column: 

From the pop up, go ahead and copy the JavaScript embed for later use on your live site:  

Make sure you highlight and copy all text that exists in this code box! This will ensure proper functionality when one adds this to a site.  

The next step is to move over to your site where you would like to have the project display within a webpage. In our example, we want to have a survey display at the top of our website. To do this, navigate to where your styling takes place on a webpage builder. Depending on where your page is hosted, the navigations will be different.  

In our example, all styling and theme changes exist on the Style page of our host. We will find the section where we can add some code, and specifically the <Custom Head> area. A custom <Head> allows for a website to have embedded JavaScript to control what appears on the site. Our site before adding a header looks like this: 

We will go ahead and navigate within the editor to the Custom <head> section and apply our copied code from the Alchemer platform: 

Save the change and look at your page! Your survey project now exists at the top of your webpage and can be answered without changing the website experience: 

And here is a live look at how a response will go, and one can seamlessly use the site afterward.

Collect Responses Where Your Audience Sees You the Most 

Being able to collect data from a place your audiences access every day is extremely valuable, and a simple way to get the information needed to best reflect and ultimately affect their experiences. With the Alchemer embed capabilities, your data collection process is taken to a whole new level! And remember, loop in with your technology and web management teams for assistance here. They should have the tools you need to be successful. For more information, check out our Embed documentation for additional details. 

The post Reach your Audience Where They Reach You: Embedding with Alchemer appeared first on Alchemer.

By Mark Jordan

When I taught at San Jose State University, I loved teaching, but hated grading. How I wish I’d known about Alchemer and the Google Sheets integration. The first time I employed it to track feedback from a survey, I saw how easy it would have made grading exams.  

Let me show you easy it is.  

First of all, you’ll need a Professional or Full Access license to get the Google Sheets integration, but the extra expense is a lot better than spending a weekend grading exam (in my humble opinion). However, adding Quiz Score only requires a Collaborator license. 

Adding Basic Questions 

One thing I really appreciate is that I can make the name and email address required by simply clicking a button.  

You can start the exam with a couple of quick multiple guess questions, like this. 

If you prefer, you can use Checkboxes to have students select all of the relevant answers (I like this approach because it reinforces the teaching as opposed to testing what students remember). 

Using Merge Codes and Piping to Populate Questions 

You can even ask questions that feed into the next question. For example, here I give students a choice of eight major influences in Renaissance Italy. When they pick one, that artist populates the next question. To do this, you need to Add Page before the question you want to populate with a previous answer. Then leave a space for the merge code. 

If you want to use Piping/Repeat to feed answers from a previous question for sorting, for example, you select the question with the answers from which you want to populate. In this case, we want to ask students to sort the reasons for the Renaissance to begin in Italy in descending order. To do that, we click the Piping/Repeat tab at the top of the question window, select the question we want, and click “Pipe Selected Items” to populate your new question with the results from the earlier question. Again, you will need a page break between the two questions. 

Be careful with piping and Google Sheets. A lot of complex piping can cause problems. Test the survey and results to make sure it works before distributing the exam. 

In the Build screen, the questions will look rather unimpressive. However, when you look at the actual test, it looks like this. 

Simplifying Life with Shortcuts 

Say you build a question with eight answers, and you want to ask another question with the same eight answers, you can Copy the question. Now all you need do is ask the new question.  

There are other ways to build True/False questions, but I like to group them. I use the Radio Button Grid for True/False because it’s easy to set up. Label your column headers True and False, then ask the questions in the Row Headers.  

Adding It All Up 

Now that we’ve finished the questions, it’s time to tally their scores. I included a brief essay question that I will have to evaluate and grade, but the rest of the scoring is done automatically.  

After you add the Quiz Score Action, you need to assign points for each question. You can also make it pass/fail with just the right answers. In that case, you can determine that say, anything more than 75% is a passing grade. I chose to score each question with a different weight.  

The Google Sheet integration allows you to import scores automatically into a spreadsheet.  

You can line this up with your grading sheet that you submit at the end of the term. For this purpose, I created one for the midterm exam. I could have created this as a separate sheet in a larger grading spreadsheet, with the results feeding into the term grading sheet. In this sheet, I let the quiz score record automatically, while the short essay I will grade separately.  

The results tab will also give you this information at the bottom. Then you can scroll up and read the essay and score it. Obviously, this student did not put a whole lot of thought into his essay. 

Even though I still have to grade the essay by hand (and eye), Alchemer has taken the mundane part and scored it for me. Even with multiple-choice tests, this saves me at least 15 minutes of checking (and in my case, double-checking) that I’ve scored it properly. That’s a quarter hour for each of 20 or more students, which is five hours when you think about it.  

More Than Easy Grades 

If you are doing research that involves surveying people or having students log information, you can use the same software. When I was working on my thesis, this would have made life so much easier than taking paper and scoring it for each researcher on the team. We could have entered our findings on a smartphone, tablet, or laptop, and the results would automatically tally.  

Unlike many research tools, Alchemer doesn’t require you to buy modules or packages to do different things. You can use the same solution for registrations, event scheduling, research, grading, even evaluations. Which means that you can license the software under your research grants and use it across the board. 

Plus, there’s a good chance that Alchemer is already approved for use at your school. In that case, procurement is a snap – and who doesn’t enjoy skipping through the procurement process? 

If you want to read more about the Alchemer approach to education, click here: https://www.alchemer.com/alchemer-for-education-institutions/  

The post Automating Grading So You Can Focus on Teaching appeared first on Alchemer.

By Michael Cordeiro, Technical Writer at Alchemer

Time and tide wait for no one, but what about your data? When does it become valuable and actionable when making decisions?

Really, it’s the moment it is collected, but how do we turn that value into operational gold?

As stakeholders ramp up their data collection, it’s important to put that information to work rapidly, and with a heavy-hitting list of integrations for Alchemer, it’s as simple as ever!

With a focus on the Slack integration, we’ll unpack and deploy a solution to keep internal stakeholders in the know with how respondents are answering projects, so they can take action to affect their experience. In our examples to follow, we’ll gear our focus to integrating a Net Promoter Score® into Slack, so that internal stakeholders can see the current feelings on the Alchemer platform.

The Building Blocks

This survey is used to track the user experience for the Alchemer platform. To start this workflow, create a new survey, adding the Net Promoter® Question Type on the build tab. The project is titled, NPS® Alchemer Customer Experience”

The NPS question is set to be required, as well as including left and right labels to identify the scaling for the question. On the Layout tab when editing the question, we added the ability to leave comments as well because it’s important to capture feedback from the customer in their own words to help understand their score selection.

Once the question type is created, we’ll create the connection between your Slack environment and the Alchemer platform. To do this, navigate to Integrations > Data Connectors from the left-hand navigation menu:

Scroll down to the Collaborator Level Integrations, and select Configure to the far right of Slack:

You’ll be prompted to title the integration. Here we use a basic title of, “NPS® Alchemer Experience Slack integration,” to easily identify the use here. Once the title is saved, one is redirected to slack to sign into the workplace where that data will be sent. Input your workspace URL which is unique to your organization, then click Continue:

Sign in to your Slack Account, while also allowing access as seen below:

Once selected, you’ll be brought back to the Alchemer integrations screen, showing a successful integration within Alchemer:

Fast Data, Swift Messaging

When the above steps are complete, we now start sending data from Alchemer into Slack, instantly looping in members of an organization with the responses received. 

Navigate to the previously created survey and add a slack action to the survey build. In our example, we see the NPS® question is on its own page, and immediately following is a page with the Slack action itself:

NOTE: make sure your Slack Action exists on a separate page after the last question one would like to send to Slack.

Edit the action, giving it a title that represents its function. Next, select the integration we have created and apply which channel or user it is being sent to:

Regarding messaging, we want to pass along both the score a respondent provided, as well as the comments around it. To set this up, Select merge code below the text box:

Click the NPS® question, then select Question Answer, which displays what a respondent selected within the Slack message one will receive:

Next, provide a comments subheader, and select the option at the bottom with the comment’s language and save the action:

Finally, edit the page using the edit pencil in the top right. Navigate to the Logic Tab, and select Automatically submit the page, running all actions and custom scripts. This will automatically process the Slack action page, providing a better respondent experience:

Users can add multiple Slack Actions where Logic drives what channels or members of an organization that information is routed to within Slack.

To do this, edit the action and navigate to the Logic tab. Only show this action based on a previous answer and define the answer options that fit the conditions needed. In this example, our action will display and fire for respondents who provided promoter defined answers as seen below:

Depending on your internal stakeholders, change where the messaging is routed to via the Channel or User text box in the primary setup tab.

Let’s Take Action

The building is complete! We’ll run a test response to ensure that the response and all the messaging is sent over to Slack.

In a successful build, we see the following when a response to the survey is complete within the designated slack channel:

We successfully sent the score for Net Promoter® as well as the comment behind the score! Additionally, email addresses, names, emails, phone numbers, and many more fields and question types can be sent to Slack, so internal stakeholders can swiftly close the loop for that response.

Understand, Interact, and Iterate with your Respondents

Data analysis and collection accelerates, as well as enables, many areas of an organization. Collecting the important snippets of information from your audience can be the make-or-break moment in retaining a customer and their loyalty, as well as fully understanding and living their journey. With effective and swift integrations like Slack and Alchemer, stakeholders can best understand several key points of concern and praise, and rapidly act on them!

For more information on the Slack Integration, check out our help documentation here.

The post Time Does Not Wait and Neither Should Data appeared first on Alchemer.

Most survey solutions will help you with a simple poll of how people feel or help you build a form to find out what people want to eat. But when it comes to building complex surveys for market research, customer experience, employee experience, or more, you need a solution that is more business software than consumer.

This chart outlines key metrics used by IT and Operations teams to select software ideal for their enterprise business.

How Enterprise Survey Solutions Stack Up

An examination of each company reveals additional details:

Qualtrics

From customer insights to market research to concept testing, Qualtrics CoreXM is the central research platform that allows anyone to capture experience insights and take action. More than 11,000+ of the world’s best brands rely on Qualtrics to power their most critical business decisions.

What users like: In-application reporting, analytics,

What users dislike: Limited flexibility, typically

What IT/InfoSec likes: Typically, Qualtrics is a safe solution

What IT/InfoSec dislikes: Requires long and complex implementation, often using professional services or consultants. Also requires IT involvement in any customization.

What Procurement likes: Easy vendor approval, one source for billing

What Procurement dislikes: High costs, unpredictable expenses for responses

Alchemer

Every market research, employee, or customer-feedback program begins with asking questions and gathering feedback. Alchemer (formerly SurveyGizmo) offers almost twice as many question types as the competition. This makes Alchemer the logical choice for serious researchers, companies surveying large groups, teams that run surveys often, and ongoing customer satisfaction surveys because there are no per-response charges.

What users like: Variety of test and question types, advanced piping and logic, flexibility, unlimited questions and virtually unlimited responses, ability to add video

What users dislike: Platform translates through browser settings, customization, email actions

What IT/InfoSec likes: Ability to centrally administer policies, ease of implementation, highest user adoption, GDPR and CCPA compliance, SOC2, ISO 27001 certification

What IT/InfoSec dislikes: Offers limited admin controls

What Procurement likes: Affordable pricing for an enterprise, volume discounts, no charge per response

What Procurement dislikes: Pricing for occasional surveys

Momentive/SurveyMonkey

SurveyMonkey is a provider of web-based survey solutions, trusted by millions of companies, organizations, and individuals alike to gather the insights they need to make more informed decisions.

What users like: Simple, easy to use, not complex

What users dislike: Lack of complexity, lack of question types, frustrations with reporting

What IT/InfoSec likes: Fairly easy to deploy

What IT/InfoSec dislikes: Lack of IT/InfoSec oversight

What Procurement likes: Initially affordable

What Procurement dislikes: Unexpected costs (80 cents per response over 10K)

SurveySparrow

SurveySparrow is an end-to-end omnichannel experience management platform that bundles Customer Experience and Employee Experience tools such as NPS, Offline, Chat, Classic, and 360° Surveys, which are mobile-first, highly engaging, and user-friendly. The conversational UI lets your surveys deliver a chat-like experience and increases survey completion rates by a whopping 40%.

What users like: Mobile survey building, conversational UI

What users dislike: Lack of question types, limited design and formatting, no white-labeling

What IT/InfoSec likes: Easy to use, no training

What IT/InfoSec dislikes: Poor support

What Procurement likes: Low entry cost

What Procurement dislikes: Poor value compared to other solutions

Typeform

Power your brand’s interactions with beautifully designed, professional-looking online forms & surveys that people just love. Collect feedback, sign people up to events, receive job applications, take payments, create engaging quizzes or interactive stories.

What users like:  Stylish surveys, ease of use, qualitative results

What users dislike: Limited capabilities, lack of qualitative results

What IT/InfoSec likes: Easy to deploy

What IT/InfoSec dislikes: Lack of compliance, poor support

What Procurement likes: Low entry cost

What Procurement dislikes: High cost per response, poor value compared to other solutions

The post The Top 5 Survey Solutions for Enterprises appeared first on Alchemer.

You have to word your questions carefully in order to avoid introducing bias, your response options need to cover all possible answers, and you need to make good use of logic to keep your response rates nice and high (and that’s just a few of many considerations).

What many survey programmers tend to overlook are the visual components of their survey. Surveys aren’t just words on a page. Font and color choices matter.

While they may seem minor compared to question types and reporting values, these are key factors in putting together an effective data collection tool.

Fonts and colors have a serious impact on how respondents perceive your survey; these perceptions influence how they respond, which in turn has an effect on your data.

Look over these basic principles of font and color choice, so the data from your next survey project won’t be tainted by misperceptions.

Survey Design 101: Font Choice Basics

Your first order of business when choosing a survey font is readability. You want to make sure people can read your questions and response options easily, otherwise they won’t be able to provide you with accurate answers.

The second priority should be creating the right subconscious message for your audience.

There are six main categories of fonts:

1. Serif: Traditional, respectable, stable, reliable. Typically read best in printed materials. Examples: Times New Roman, Georgia, Baskerville.
2. Sans serif: Objective, simple, straightforward, sensible. Common choice for digital reading. Examples: Helvetica, Verdana, Arial.
3. Script: Personal, feminine, fancy, elegant. Best used in moderation, as they can be difficult to read. Examples: Lobster, Pacifico, Brush Script.
4. Modern: Friendly, quirky, unconventional, fashionable. Often associated with technology and innovation. Examples: Infinity, Politica, Matchbook.
5. Display: Smart, trendy, forward-thinking, quirky. Designed to be displayed at large sizes. Examples: Carousel, Amerika, Collegiate.
6. Decorative: Fun, unique, casual, informal. Often custom made; typically best for headlines rather than body copy. Examples: Papyrus, Cracked, Jokerman.

Are you building a fun, whimsical quiz? Decorative or modern fonts can help reinforce the entertainment factor.

Hoping for a neutral tone to avoid bias in your brand awareness survey? Stick with basic serif or sans serif choices.

Usability expert Dan Partain is a strong believer in choosing the right font for a survey:

Your font choice sets the tone for your survey. Before even reading the words, a respondent sees the shapes of the words and instantly judges your book by its cover. Want to keep it all business? Stick to something easy to read and without anything that looks too “Designy.” Lato, Arial, Verdana, Roboto, and Montserrat are all good choices.

Whether we consider it or not, our fonts will have an impact on the way people perceive our survey. Take a few minutes to choose carefully so you can send a message that matches your larger survey goals.

Colors and Survey Design

Red, for example, can be perceived as exciting and energizing, but it can also seem violent and dangerous. A good alternative might be something closer to tangerine, an orange/red hybrid that comes off as energizing with aggressive undertones.

Deep blue is often seen as a “safe” color choice, as it conveys feelings of credibility and authority. On the other hand, there’s the risk of this color coming off as aloof, distant, or melancholy.

What we have to remember when designing surveys is that all of our color choices need to combine to create the final feeling we want to offer our respondents.

New to color theory? Check out this awesome guide to positive and negative emotions that colors can stimulate:

Choosing Colors to Enhance Survey Design, Readability and Usability

While emotional impact is an important consideration for color choice, accessibility is key as well.

High contrast helps visually impaired respondents see your questions and answers, and for users taking a survey on mobile, color contrast can be particularly helpful.

Keep in mind that some data points may get completely lost on those who are colorblind if you rely too heavily on color to show options.

Our usability expert reminds us:

Color choice is more than just matching your logo, you need to keep readability and contrast in mind. You can’t go wrong with keeping the main page white and the text black, even if you want to spice things up with the window background and buttons. If you do want color on the page, don’t make it too bright, and don’t have the text too close to the background color.

Looking for a good basic rule of thumb? Dan tells us, “Don’t make respondents work harder than you.”

——————

Sources:

https://www.companyfolders.com/blog/font-psychology-how-typefaces-hack-our-brains
https://visual.ly/psychology-fonts

The post Beginner’s Guide to Fonts and Colors for Survey Design appeared first on Alchemer.

Survey questions are like the walls, floors, doors, and windows of a house: they’re vital, but if you put them up without laying a foundation you’re in for some serious trouble.

So, if you haven’t already, check out these previous articles on identifying your survey goals and considering your survey design before you start building.

Ok, ready to move forward? Great. Time to create a great survey.

Constructing Survey Questions

Survey design involves thinking about the psychology, emotions and words behind the questions. The design process is the strategic phase. It requires the Big Picture, including your survey goals and learning objectives.

Actually building the survey, on the other hand, is the tactical phase. It takes into account the logistical issues like security, logic, survey fatigue, bias, and data collection.

During survey builds you think about the nitty gritty, including question types, survey length, anonymity, and data analysis.

Turning Goals Into Real Survey Questions

Generally a small team of 1-3 are involved in constructing a survey, though they should certainly take stakeholder input into account during the process.

Survey design — particularly the identification of goals and objectives — can be a group effort, but having too many workers on a construction site can create more problems than it solves.

Ideally your survey construction team will consist of the people who will be responsible for presenting the data, because they need to understand where it came from in order to talk about it intelligently. Other good team members may be those who are going to be acting on the data; they’ll often have different insights into question phrasing and order.

Qualitative vs. Quantitative Questions

One of the biggest questions about questions is whether to use qualitative or quantitative question types. The answer to this question depends on what you want to achieve.

Qualitative questions are open ended. They usually include a “why” somewhere, and they can be very useful in helping to define a problem.

Quantitative questions are designed to simply gather data, not ask opinions.

Both are highly useful, but you should choose between them carefully because they offer very different kinds of data.

Qualitative Questions

Qualitative questions help define a problem. They ask “WHY?”

If you are exploring a hypothesis, a qualitative survey can identify a problem and its nuances before conducting a quantitative survey. Qualitative question are open-ended, which means text analysis is required to interpret results (and these are particularly susceptible to interpretation bias).

Qualitative Question Types

Qualitative questions are always open text questions, but they come in many forms, including:

• Text Box: responses can be one word to one sentence long
• Essay Box: several sentences to several hundred words, depending on the limit you set (or don’t set)

When asking a qualitative question, consider using an autocomplete feature to minimize data cleanup. This lets you suggest common answers so that you get consistent responses, but it can also introduce bias, so proceed with caution.

It’s worth trying, however, because having the same answer format will make it much easier to analyze the data.

For instance, these answer options all mean the same thing to a human respondent:

• twenty-five
• 25
• twentyfive
• Twenty-Five

But each format (including upper case versus lower case) will be treated as a different answer option during open text analysis.

Reporting on essay questions can be especially challenging. Some tools will help you by creating word clouds of common terms or performing open text analysis, but to get the full impact long-form questions really need to be read individually.

Quantitative Questions

Quantitative question ask “WHAT”, “WHEN”, or “HOW”.

These questions typically quantify a pre-defined problem so you can understand how prevalent it is. Quantitative questions have limited answer options, which makes it easier to measure the results.

Quantitative Question Types

These are the most commonly used quantitative survey questions, and your respondents will know how to deal with them. There are less common, more advanced varieties of quantitative questions, but keeping it relatively simple will create a better experience for those answering your survey.

Common question types include:

• Radio Button: Use these when you want a single answer option.
• Check Box: Use these when multiple answer options are acceptable.
• Drop Down: These are most commonly used as single select, but can also be used as multi-select answer options. Use these to save space when presenting a long list of answer options.
• Likert Scale: These are most commonly used for measuring emotions such as satisfaction or agreement. Odd numbered scales allow for a neutral response.

Avoiding Survey Fatigue

Online surveys shouldn’t be exhausting to take. Tired respondents will either abandon your survey or give you substandard data. This means that when you’re building your survey, you need to take the respondent’s experience into consideration.

Having a long list of items to rank generally increases fatigue and dramatically increases drop-offs.

Many surveys fail to collect useful data simply because they were not designed to keep their respondents interested. As a survey builder, it is your job to reduce survey fatigue whenever possible while still gathering solid data that your team can act on.

The first step is to choose your question types carefully! Limit the number of qualitative questions, which are far more fatiguing to answer than their quantitative cousins.

General Question Guidelines

You also need to make sure that people taking your survey don’t get thrown by awkward answer options or question construction.

A common error is creating overlapping answer options. Selecting one choice should completely exclude all the others; when answers intersect it can cause a lot of confusion.

For example:

Correct format:
How long have you been a member?
1-10 years
11-20 years
21–30 years
31+ years

Incorrect format:
How long have you been a member?
1-10 years
10-20 years
20–30 years
30+ years

You’ll also want to refrain from using double-barreled questions, which combine multiple questions into one. This adds confusion and skews your data.

For example:

Don’t ask:
How satisfied are you with our buffet food and drink options?

Instead, ask:
How satisfied are you with our buffet food options? Address drink in a separate question.

Finally, ensure that you provide inclusive answer options for required questions. If you’re not sure that you’ve included all the possible responses in your answer choices, include an “other” option for those who don’t find the right choice in your list. A forced answer that doesn’t apply will taint your results.

The Importance of Survey Validation

Validation is the process of checking your survey to ensure it meets your specifications and fulfills its intended purpose.

Like editing a document, validation requires a detailed review of answer options, logic, reporting values, and reporting data to verify that you are setup to collect quality data.

It can be time-consuming, but the benefits you’ll see in your data quality make it more than worth the effort!

How to Validate Your Survey

Validation is a key component of great survey design, but it’s often overlooked as people skip straight to testing. Testing can uncover some problems with a survey, but validation is a more rigorous review process.

A common problem occurs when different data formats are treated as different answer options. This will make it hard to analyze the data unless we do some data cleaning to standardize the answer format.

Discovering these issues earlier rather than later will save a lot of time and headache down the road, and it’s not an issue that is likely to come up during a standard test.

Changing the question type, adding instructional text on the proper format you would like entered, using autocomplete, or using a data validation feature will go along way in solving this common problem.

Testing Your Survey

Testing your survey simply involves taking your survey on the different devices that your respondents will be using to ensure it displays and flows correctly.

Advanced survey tools provide a testing feature that quickly generate test data so that you can also look at the results to see if it reports as you expected.

Still, you should have stakeholders, colleagues, and friends take your survey for thorough testing.

Run a few reports on the data, then ask yourself these burning survey questions:

• Are your questions reporting the way you expect?
• Are you able to create the reports you need using the data you’re collecting?
• Is the data in the format you need?

The Power of Survey Logic

One of the coolest parts of building a survey is adding logic. It’s like including little magic tricks that change how the survey acts for different respondents.

Put simply, logic is a set of conditions that you can apply to a question, answer, or even an entire page of your survey that affects how it performs.

For example, you might ask if your respondents had an appetizer last time they were at your restaurant. If they answer “No,” you could use logic to skip them past all the questions about appetizers.

Survey logic is extremely powerful, and its benefits come in two flavors:

Fatigue Fighting: Keep respondents engaged by only showing them questions that are relevant to them.

• Page-jumping: Skip entire pages that aren’t relevant to a respondent.
• Show-when logic: Only show questions when particular conditions are met.
• Percent branching: Randomly assign a set percentage of your respondents to a branch of your survey.
• Piping (a.k.a. repeating): Inserting data collected early in the survey into a later question.

Bias Fighting: Avoid any bias that might come from your question or content order.

• Randomization: Randomize question and/or answer options.
• Disqualification: Prevent those who don’t qualify from answering your survey to collect cleaner data.
• Survey timing: Identify and disqualify survey responses that were answered too quickly.
• Vote protection: Prevent respondents from taking your survey more than once.

Survey logic is one of the best ways to keep your survey relevant and collect quality data.

A Well-Built Survey is a Successful Survey

Approaching your survey build with care and attention will make sure that it serves your ultimate purpose. By creating an appealing design and an experience that’s as personalized as possible, you’ll get more engaged respondents who give you better data.

Keep these best practices in mind and you’ll be well on your way to building a beautiful survey on the great design foundation that you’ve created.

The post Building Your Survey With the Right Questions appeared first on Alchemer.

How often are you collecting information from the same core group of survey respondents? 

In today’s market, it has become so important to poll a group consistently over time. With Alchemer, we have a way to reach the same core group of respondents without having to import them into a new email or SMS campaign each time you need some insight. 

Enter the Contact Lists feature! 

Contact Lists is a feature that helps Alchemer users accelerate data collection and ensure that the right groups are being consistently polled. Really, it allows you to skip the step of adding contacts each time a new campaign is being created. Below we will dive into how to make a Contact List and where to use them! 

The Setup 

To create a Contact List, start by clicking Audience from the left-hand navigation menu: 

When Audience is clicked, users see a screen displaying all previously built out contact lists in the platform. Select Create New List to create a new library of contacts. Once Create New List is clicked, users first will name the list to easily identify the purpose and targeted audience that the list focused on. For this example, we will name the list Customer Success (CS) to target an internal CS department:

Once you have named the list, we are ready to upload a contact list file! We upload a CSV, XLS, or XLSX file type containing information related to the contact that we would like to exist in each response (email, first name, last name, team, location, etc.). Check the box for header if your file includes a header row labeling what exists in the column (email, first name, last name, phone number, etc.):

At the bottom of the pop-up window, select Create List. Next, we see a new window appear that allows us to match each column from the file with a field in Alchemer. We then match each column header with a corresponding field it is linked to for data analysis, and click Continue:

Once continue is selected, our Contact list is ready to send email campaigns or SMS campaigns! The newly created list is now displayed under the Audience section and is ready to be used:

Adding Contact Lists to Projects

Now let’s use our contact list globally across all surveys needing some feedback from those respondents! To do this, first build out your project and questions that you would like to ask. When satisfied with the survey build, add an email campaign to the survey by navigating to the Share Tab, scrolling down to Campaigns and Source Tracking to click Send via Email Campaign:

This brings a user to the Email Campaign Designer. We will create the campaign to our specifications and select Next: Add contacts to leverage the Contact List. On the Contact Tab of the email campaign, click Add Contacts, and then Use an Existing List. From the dropdown that displays, we see our created Customer Success Team contact list!

Choose the contact list that one would like to use with the dropdown menu. When Import Contacts is clicked, we see that the list added to the audience section exists in the email campaign and it is ready to be sent! Navigate to the Send campaign tab and your email campaign to send the email to the list referenced:

Contact Lists are designed to be used globally across many projects in an Alchemer account. Any email campaign created within an Alchemer account with Contact lists can accelerate its builds by referencing a contact list, thus removing a step of manually adding contacts to a single campaign at a time!

The best decisions are made from concise data collection against targeted populations

Consensus in collected data is best measured by persistent polling of key stakeholders and teams in an organization. The most informed decisions rely on being able to look at change over time, across a particular team, customer, or business. When users leverage Contact lists, it enables teams to act on their targeted audience swiftly and efficiently.

The post Accelerate Emails and SMS Campaigns with Contact Lists appeared first on Alchemer.

By Alli Milne and Andrew Sturtz  

Global research, such as exploring new markets, often means talking to people in a language other than English. Sometimes it also means setting different kinds of quotas so that you get the right mix of respondents for your research.  

To help you translate and set quotas, Alchemer University launched a new program on June 30, 2021 – Tools: Translations and Quotas. 

This program includes two courses to help users build and launch multilingual projects, and to add different types of quotas into projects. The Text and Translations Tool removes boundaries from collecting data from multilingual audiences.  

The Quotas Tool allows users to set limits on the desired number of responses captured according to defined conditions. This is important when you include an incentive and want to limit the number of responses, or you want to get an even distribution of respondents across conditions for a market research study. 

New courses include: 

• Course 1: Text and Translations 
• Course 2: Quotas 

Course 1: Text and Translations 

By the end of this course, you will be able to: 

• Translate a project into multiple languages  
• Understand the different options for adding multiple languages 
• Share multilingual projects   

Course 2: Quotas 

By the end of this course, you will be able to: 

• Identify the different types of quotas and how to best use them 
• Set quotas for total responses, logic segments, and links  
• Review and monitor project quota information 

New! Alchemer University Feedback Survey 

We are looking for feedback on your Alchemer University experience so far. Please take our survey within the Reports Program, or click here:  https://survey.alchemer.com/s3/6314076/tools 

Alchemer University Keeps Growing 

Since the first program was released in early 2020, more than 32,000 Alchemer users have successfully enrolled and participated in AU Courses to increase their knowledge and usage of the application. Check out our other programs as well: 

• Beginning Essentials Level 1 
• Beginning Essentials Level 2 
• Account Administration 
• Building Advanced Questions 
• Actions  
• Logic 
• Style 
• Email Campaigns 
• Distribution 
• Managing Responses 
• Reports 
• Exports 

The post Reach More People in Their Language appeared first on Alchemer.

What is the Chi-Square Test?

The Chi-Square test is a statistical procedure used by researchers to examine the differences between categorical variables in the same population. 

For example, imagine that a research group is interested in whether or not education level and marital status are related for all people in the U.S. 

After collecting a simple random sample of 500 U.S. citizens, and administering a survey to this sample, the researchers could first manually observe the frequency distribution of marital status and education category within their sample. 

The researchers could then perform a Chi-Square test to validate or provide additional context for these observed frequencies.

Chi-Square calculation formula is as follows:

When is the Chi-Square Test Used in Market Research?

Market researchers use the Chi-Square test when they find themselves in one of the following situations:

• They need to estimate how closely an observed distribution matches an expected distribution. This is referred to as a “goodness-of-fit” test.
• They need to estimate whether two random variables are independent.

When to Use the Chi-Square Test on Survey Results

The Chi-Square test is most useful when analyzing cross tabulations of survey response data. 

Because cross tabulations reveal the frequency and percentage of responses to questions by various segments or categories of respondents (gender, profession, education level, etc.), the Chi-Square test informs researchers about whether or not there is a statistically significant difference between how the various segments or categories answered a given question.

Important things to note when considering using the Chi-Square test

First, Chi-Square only tests whether two individual variables are independent in a binary, “yes” or “no” format.

Chi-Square testing does not provide any insight into the degree of difference between the respondent categories, meaning that researchers are not able to tell which statistic (result of the Chi-Square test) is greater or less than the other.

Second, Chi-Square requires researchers to use numerical values, also known as frequency counts, instead of using percentages or ratios. This can limit the flexibility that researchers have in terms of the processes that they use.

What Software is Needed to Run a Chi-Square Test?

Chi-Square tests can be run in either Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets, however, there are more intuitive statistical software packages available to researchers, such as SPSS, Stata, and SAS. 

Check out this article on Exporting Your Survey Data with SPSS to learn how to get started today!

The post An Introduction to the Chi-Square Test & When to Use It appeared first on Alchemer.