Ranking questions are a popular way to understand how respondents in UX research prioritize items such as product features, habits, purchases, color schemes, or designs. Forcing participants to make tradeoffs on what’s most important versus least important helps avoid the “everything is important” problem you get when you ask respondents to simply rate how important
We’ve written extensively about question types, the elements of good and bad writing, why people forget, and common problems with survey questions. But how do you get started writing questions? Few professionals we know have taken a formal course in survey development and instead rely on their experiences or best practices. Despite being called questions,
Crafting survey questions involves thinking first about the content and then about the format (form follows function). Earlier, we categorized survey questions into four content types (attribute, behavior, ability, or sentiment) and four format classes (open-ended, closed-ended static, closed-ended dynamic, or task-based). As with any taxonomy, there are several ways to categorize response options (e.g.,
