Mobile users are likely to take your survey anywhere, at any time—if they take it at all. With that said, the main thing you need to keep in mind when it comes to mobile survey best practices is convenience.
You’re only going to hold a mobile user’s attention for a short amount of time, so the more you do to make taking the survey easy, the more likely you are to get enough of a sampling to make some accurate observations.
To that end, keep these considerations in mind.
You’ll get a much better response if you keep the survey within your site. This makes the survey easier to place in context with the functioning of the rest of the site. You won’t ask users to navigate to another location. This is more convenient for them. Plus, the interval they devote to completing the survey will be considered time on your site, which helps your search engine ranking.
Even with today’s larger smartphones, you’re still dealing with a fraction of the screen area desktop machines provide. Your questions and the overall design of your survey must take this into consideration.
The good news here is premium website templates, like those offered by Shopify, automatically adjust to accommodate a variety of devices. Still, it’s a good idea to think mobile first, even with a responsive platform.
Most people are accustomed to using smartphones in the vertical orientation, so plan your layouts around that view. With that said, it won’t hurt to ensure it looks good when viewed horizontally as well. Lists should be short enough to fit on one screen and narrow enough to be read in their entirety when the phone is held vertically.
Remember, it’s all about catering to a short attention span. Long, drawn out, complicated questions will get your survey ignored. Limit the number of questions to no more than ten, ask them as succinctly as possible and make them closed-ended.
Avoid asking questions requiring a lot of typing to answer. However, make sure you do give users a text box large enough to encourage expounding upon an answer if they desire.
If you’re going to require respondents to use sliders or buttons, make them as large as practicable. Leave space around them to negate fat-thumbing other buttons and sliders. Position these features first, then place your text around them.
Smartphones endow you with remarkable design capabilities. However, the simpler you make the survey, the more likely you are to get a favorable response rate. Adding flourishes just for the sake of flourishes will distract respondents and complicate the process.
These functions make it too easy for users to overlook questions. Dropdown menus obscure part of the screen, so people might miss the questions they block. Similarly, scrolling may cause your subjects to inadvertently omit certain questions. While we’re at it, make everything on the screen large enough to be read by most people without zooming the screen.
A given format might respond differently to Android as opposed to iOS. Happily though, given these two account for just over 95 percent of the mobile market, you can safely ignore all others.
When the design is complete, check it out on as many different devices as possible. Have your acquaintances complete the survey so you can get feedback from a friendly audience before releasing it into the wild.
These mobile survey best practices will help you garner the best possible participation for your questions. Ideally, this will lead to collecting the insights you need to improve your operations.
