The Butt Ugly Weblog

Questionnaires 101

Dear unnamed researchers: I'm fine with filling your questionnaire. I like to give my opinion (who doesn't?). But you should pay a bit attention to scalability: Putting in 33 questions on 11 different products means 363 boxes to tick. If you actually need me to think and put in a number from 0-6, the time that I need to use to respond to the questions just explodes: at five seconds of thinking time for each question, I need to spend over half an hour to go through the entire list. Even if I know and use only half of the products, it's still about 15 minutes.

And that is fine too, but don't come telling me that "it's only going to take a couple of minutes."

US Government official forms have this "filling this form should take no more than XX minutes" in the bottom. If you make a form, try to figure out how long it actually takes for someone to respond to.