Once you have established the answers you need, think about the type of questions that will provide these answers. Besides having a goal to accomplish, recognizing a respondents attention span is critical to getting accurate information for you to use in your business decisions. You want to recognize that as your respondent loses their energy by reading and understanding your questions, the accuracy of their responses declines. So your questions should demand as little energy as possible.
In the book “Thinking Fast Slow”, author Daniel Kahneman describes how the brain uses energy in the way we think. If we are asked to consider something that is familiar, easy to understand, comfortable for us to think about, then this is “fast thinking”. If we are asked to consider something that is complex, difficult for us to understand, painful to think about, this is “slow thinking”. For supplementary education, refer to the book “Thinking Fast … Slow” by Daniel Kahneman, as reviewed by NY Times and The Guardian.
For survey question design, you want to use as many “fast thinking” questions as possible so your respondent provides the most accurate responses. If I ask you, “What is your favorite ice cream flavour?”, this is a fast thinking question and the accuracy of your response will be high. If I ask you, “Which is the most important part of starting your business? A: selecting your name, B: Educating yourself on the type of business you want to start, or C: Creating a network for selling your product or service.. This is a slow thinking question because it is unfamiliar to us, difficult to compare these concepts, not an easy answer to provide and will demand a lot of energy to supply an answer. Too many of these will have the accuracy of the respondents to be very low and not useful for your business decisions.
In other words, use a combination of difficult (thinking slow type) and easy (thinking fast type) questions. Complicated questions are hard to understand. Therefore you should avoid using difficult questions that are hard to answer or unfamiliar topics for the respondent.
Lastly, watch out for jargon, use simple language and use explanations when appropriate. For example you can use explanations for new concepts and ideas to avoid assumptions. Another consequence of recognizing the demand on your respondent is that shorter surveys result in less fatigue and get higher quality answers.. An ideal number of questions to strive for is 3 questions per objective, with 3 objectives, resulting in 9 questions..