Questionnaire Design Made Easy: Stop Herding Cats and Start Shaping Strategy
Blog Post
As a consumer insights professional, the questionnaire development process can often feel… hectic.
What starts as a simple Word document can easily devolve into version-control chaos. Some feedback will be properly left in the document. But some feedback will come through a separate email. Some will come through Slack, some via cryptic highlighted text, and some via a new PDF called Questionnaire_feedback_final_V6_near final_Dave's copy.xls.pdf
At Langston, our ultimate goal is to help you make confident decisions through strategic insights. And that can't happen if you're spending all of your time managing chaos and herding cats.
That's why we developed our questionnaire builder platform designed specifically to manage the complexity inherent to the custom questionnaire development process.
Here are a few key features of the questionnaire builder platform that help save you time and energy and provide clarity and headspace.
Clean, Easy-to-Navigate Interface
No matter if you wrote the survey yourself or are seeing it for the first time, our clean UX allows for anyone to easily follow along with the flow of a survey. Logic is separated from question text, fraud terms are highlighted in red, question labels are easy to read, and conversations (we’ll get to those in a second!) are easy to access and engage with.
Controllable Access
You control who you'd like to have access to the questionnaire and what level of access you'd like each person to have. This can range from creating a full, password-protected account for core team members who have permission to edit questionnaire content, all the way to a quick, shareable link with comment-only access for those who just want to review and provide brief feedback.
Comments and Conversations
One of the reasons why Word and Google Docs are still the primary vehicles for questionnaire development is the ability to leave and reply to comments. We've replicated this feature in our questionnaire builder so that you can continue to have a dialogue with your team members and your Langston team in a controlled environment where the survey can be left intact. Users can have comment-only privileges which will allow them to only engage in this way vs. being able to make any edits to survey content.
Comments can be marked “Complete” when the task is completed and removed from view. But don’t worry - they can always be un-archived and shown again if anything needs to be revisited.
Modular Survey Templates
Langston's structured approach to research using our research modules means that every survey comes with a ready-to-use template with the question types and module order already optimized for analysis. This makes your survey development as paint-by-numbers as possible. The survey itself is already structured in a way to deliver strategic thinking so you can focus on adding your expertise and choosing what content and inputs get included in each module.
Inputs Groups
To add and update content in the survey, you can use our inputs groups feature to collaboratively (or on your own, whichever you prefer!) develop the key inputs you need for your survey, such as the competitor list for a brand funnel, the brand associations for brand positioning, or the advertising channels for ad recall.
Users’ access levels control exactly which content in the survey is editable by you and others. If you'd like your team to collaborate on creating a list of competitors for the brand funnel but not associations for brand positioning, all of that is customizable. Once you’re happy with the inputs you’ve entered, you can lock them all down so that nobody can change them and a final copy of the study can be perfectly preserved.
Lastly, this and all of our tools here at Langston are continuously improving through feedback from our client users. We hope to one day work with you and learn what you need to make our platform even stronger - always in an effort to provide clarity, reduce chaos, and help you spend your time where it matters most.
DISCLAIMER: We base our research, recommendations, and forecasts on techniques, information and sources we believe to be reliable. We cannot guarantee future accuracy and results. The Langston Co. will not be liable for any loss or damage caused by a reader's reliance on our research.