How to Use Slider Questions in Your Online Poll?

When creating your employee survey questions, marketing survey questions or customer satisfaction questions, it is important to be familiar with the different types of survey question wordings you can use. One of the most common survey questions being used today in online polls is the slider survey question. What are these questions and how do you incorporate them to your online polls?

What are Slider Survey Questions?

A slider survey question is a type often used for questions wherein the answers are rated on a scale. This offers a more usable albeit different take on the common range question type. The truth is, there is one notable difference between a range question type and a slider question type. With a slider, there is an indicated starting point. The respondents can either opt to keep their initial starting point or they can drag the slider to make it agree with their personal preferences. Through providing an ability of sliding a bar on the visual line, the researchers can easily enhance the usability of their online poll and at the same time, gather more nuanced answers from the survey takers or respondents.

Where Do You Use Slider Survey Questions?

The slider survey questions can be used for a number of functions and purposes. Below are some good examples of slider survey questions.

• Where do you belong on the political spectrum in the US?
• How often do you ride your bike to the office?
• On a scale of 1 to 10, how much do you agree with the statement below?
• What percent of your monthly income goes to charity?

As you can observe from these questions, every time you want to measure the degree or level of something, the slider survey question might be the best type you can use.

How Do You Set Up Sliders for Your Survey?

When you set up your slider survey questions, there are actually several different options available for you. You can choose to add different labels, units or you can also decide on where you would like the slider to begin.

What are the Other Things You Can Do With Sliders?

The slider survey questions tend to be very flexible. This then gives you the ability to customize them in any way you want and any way you can. You can even use CSS in order to change the slider’s graphics and do different things, such as the following:

• Add a gradient to the overall feel of the slider
• Change the slider’s color
• Change the handle of the slider from a simple bar to an image.

No matter what the purpose of your online poll may be, the proper use of slider survey questions can help you a lot in getting the answers you need and ensure that they are as accurate as you want them to be. These survey questions can greatly influence the results you acquire from your online polls in more ways than one.  

Best Way to Design a Matrix Question in Online Survey

If you take a look at the best survey sites, you will notice how they make use of different questions when they make online survey.

Every online poll is composed of questions that are designed according to the results that the free poll maker or online survey creator wants to get or acquire. Probably among the most common and famous of questions used not only in online surveys but even in traditional pen and paper surveys is none other than the matrix question.

The matrix question is basically multiple questions that are presented on a grid form. For an online survey creator, these bundled questions are easier to write and program. These questions are also generally easier to understand and answer in the case of the respondents since the answer options and scales pretty much stay the same in all the items.

But, it is this very surface simplicity of a matrix question that masks its notable drawbacks. For you to gather high quality data, it is important to be familiar with the main pitfalls of this particular type of question, especially now that more and more surveys are being done and answered using mobile devices.

As it is very easy to create these matrix questions, you will notice how this question type is overused by free poll makers. These provide a lot of response options and a lot of rows or items. This is what makes it hard for the respondents to read and it can even promote a poor behavior in taking surveys. They can opt for straight lining in which the respondents choose the same response for every item without giving each row a careful consideration or they can also randomly choose responses for the reason that they just want to finish everything and escape the matrix.

Simple Tips to Write Good Matrix Questions

• Try to keep the response options as short as possible. These response options are the columns of the possible responses.
• Display just five or even fewer response options.
• Ensure that the item wording is short. These items are the rows.
• Once again, display just five or fewer items.

You don’t have to worry in case your matrix questions don’t follow these guidelines as you can still use every question you have written. You can always improve the overall experience for the respondents and gather better data by doing either of these two things: you can choose to break up the matrix into several individual questions or you can break up the large matrix into smaller matrixes.

You also have to remember the fact that most online surveys are completed using mobile devices. For this reason, matrix questions in horizontal formatting are not great for smartphones so be careful when designing the questions and make them suitable for mobile viewing. This will ensure that you will get the answers that you need while ensuring seamless experience for your respondents.