Types of Survey Questions

There are two main types of questions in online surveys:

Definition: Questions that include a set of predefined answers for the user to select from.
Example: Rating overall satisfaction on a scale (e.g., highly satisfied to highly dissatisfied).
Data Type: Produces structured data, giving clear-cut results in the form of percentages.

Definition: Questions with no predefined answer options; users type responses in their own words.
Data Type: Produces unstructured data.
Example: Asking how an experience could be improved, with an open text box for the response.
Recommendation: Limit to two or three open-ended questions per survey to avoid user fatigue.
Requires more effort from the user, as they need to think about their answer and type it out.
Requires more effort from the designer because the responses collected need to be analyzed.
Analysis: Responses need to be coded to make sense of the data.

Definition: Assigning tags or codes to different responses to spot patterns across user answers.
Process:
- Some survey tools include tagging functionality to add themes to user responses within the platform.
- The tool calculates the percentage of responses assigned to each theme automatically.
- If tagging functionality is unavailable, export data to a spreadsheet and manually assign codes to each response.
- Calculate the percentage of responses assigned to each code manually.