Preventing high dropout rates

Research is a profession that should be carried out by experts. The biggest threat to quick and cost-efficient research is that the quality is almost always suffering. DVJ wants research to remain good. Even when it is quick and against low cost. For this reason, we regularly share examples of mistakes and best practises in the market. We share our thoughts and possible solutions to improve research. By following these tips, we can make research better.

As a market researcher I love improving my questionnaires. It is especially important to me that my respondents are engaged, because I know that this leads to high quality data and low drop-out rates.

However, sometimes I stumble upon online questionnaires that are just truly dreadful to fill in. Just take a look at the example below.

Figure 1

You might be wondering, what is wrong with this example? Well, the questionnaire presented me with way too many answer options, which made me scroll down forever to answer just one simple question. Additionally, they didn’t give me enough time to fill it in. As a result, they made me start right from the beginning again, which naturally caused me to be very frustrated.

What happened next may not come as a surprise: I gave up entirely. This could have easily been prevented if the questionnaire was designed smartly and I would not have been overloaded with irrelevant answer options. Additionally, if they would have given me enough time to answer the question, they would have prevented me from filling in the questionnaire twice.

When questionnaires are designed in a smart way, which doesn’t require respondents to go through dozens of answer options, it would make it a lot more fun, and prevent respondents from dropping-out in future surveys.