Yesterday I was out at the ballpark watching one of my favorite teams play.  During the game, I received a promotion to fill out an online survey for a chance to win money.  To see just what was involved in the promotion, I pulled up the website on my phone and tried to fill out the survey right then and there.  3 innings later, I was still trying to complete the survey.

So what went wrong?

1. Site wasn’t optimized for phone platforms: When I got home, I pulled apart the survey’s code and found that it was running too many things in the background, keeping my phone’s browser from being able to display the information on the page until everything in the background had run its course.

2. Too many questions: There was page after page of survey questions, a lot of them being redundant or of little value to any marketing team.

3. Filling in the blanks was difficult: Once I got through the survey, I had to enter my information.  Unfortunately, it took me 5 minutes to enter my phone number because that field had difficulty registering the input from my phone.

Keep these things in mind when you go about designing your own surveys.  The ability of customers to use their phones to access the web means that you have to think about how to apply surveys to this new technology to get better data from your customers.

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