Survey Design

A single pejorative phrase before the question, or one extra option in the answer set, is enough to skew survey results in a direction you didn't intend. Biased questions are the most common — and most invisible — survey-design mistake. Here's what they look like, why they happen, and how to fix them with real examples.

"How do you rate the speed and accuracy of our response?" sounds reasonable until the customer is fast and inaccurate, or vice versa — and the answer ends up meaning nothing. Double-barrelled questions are one of the most common survey-design mistakes. Here's what they look like, why they happen, and how to split them properly.

Most training feedback forms ask 15 questions and tell you nothing actionable about the course. After analysing tens of thousands of responses across hundreds of training surveys, six questions consistently emerge as the only ones that matter. Here's the list, why each one earns its place, and the popular questions you can confidently drop.

Customer surveys vary a lot; the mistakes inside them really don't. The same eleven question errors keep showing up across industries — mandatory questions, missing N/A options, asking what you already know, the 30th question. Here's the list, with how to identify each one and the fix that takes minutes, not weeks.

Club Med's post-stay survey arrives personalised, well-timed, and immediately falls apart — images-as-content, question overload, and a hidden lead-gen form at the end. Here's a teardown of where a well-resourced brand's customer survey went wrong, and the specific mistakes that are worth not copying in yours.

How much can a single word in a survey question shift the answer? Substantially more than most survey designers think. This short video walks through a real example — "easy" vs "difficult" in the same question — and shows why word choice quietly biases your data before the respondent even gets to the scale.