Hey everyone, As you may know, the new version of LimeSurvey is here! We made several changes to the user interface to improve the user experience. So we have been working on making the first steps in terms of stabilizing and improving the user interface. More enhancements are on the way, we will keep you posted. The following is the new UI design changelog for the latest version of LimeSurvey. We will update you on even more changes to the user interface and other new features in future articles. Below you will find the major user interface improvements to help you get started quickly and easily. Enjoy! “Create survey” shortcut in main navigation You just want to get going and cut to the chase? Great, just choose the first item from the main navigation and you’re ready to go. One click and you are exactly where you want to be, the survey section. Modals (Pop-Ups) All pop-ups in the application now have the same style and are built according to a certain structure to make the whole workflow more user-friendly. Page headers To get a better understanding of where you are in the application we have introduced green banners at the top of every screen of the application. Top bar The most important action buttons have been moved to the top bar and the amount of action buttons has been reduced to the essentials. Action buttons All action buttons are now styled in the same way and one specific action will always have the same icon associated with it for consistency. The most important actions are consistently positioned in the same location, to the left of the top bar. Furthermore, the most important action buttons have been moved to the left-hand side of all tables and we brought consistency in terms of icons, hovers, margins and the order of buttons. Additionally, small text balloons will appear when hovering over them, explaining the functionality of the concerning button. Tables All tables now have a new grid view class and are consistently styled and structured. You will find all buttons to help you see more information or make edits on the far left-hand side of the table. This helps you better manage your surveys, data and survey participants. Icons and small elements Three different icons for a single functionality like “Save”? No thanks! One icon is associated with exactly one functionality to make the design more accessible. The consistency makes for a better user experience. We also synchronized other small elements like dropdown-menu icons, page buttons of tables, main navigation elements and notifications. Pagination Under every table of the application you can now find consistent pagination to the far right-hand side. You can determine how many items you want your table to show you and, by doing so, customize your survey management. We hope you enjoy the new version! Now it is even easier to turn your questions into answers. We will update this changelog with more content whenever there are new elements to the user interface.More blog posts with specifics about these improvements and other changes to the user interface will follow in the upcoming period, so stay tuned. Have a nice day, everybody!
User Interface Design Changelog

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It is said that the NPS value is heavily linked with revenue growth and, therefore, a key metric to establish customer loyalty by a provider of a product or service. The Net Promoter Score consists of a single powerful question that simply asks “How likely is it that you would recommend company/product/service XYZ to a friend or a colleague?”. It offers an array of answer options ranging from values 0 (“Not at all likely”) to 10 (“Extremely likely”). It was developed by Fred Reichheld and introduced in 2003.* How to calculate the Net Promoter Score First, your survey respondents are divided into three groups: Those that chose answer options 0 to 6 are categorized as detractors, i.e., people who are not particularly satisfied with your products or services. Respondents who chose 7 or 8 are labelled passives who are neutrally motivated users and later ignored when calculating the Net Promoter Score. Lastly, those who chose 9 or 10 are your promoters, i.e., your loyal and satisfied customers who would gladly recommend your company and its products and services to other people. The actual NPS calculation is done in two steps. First, you need to determine the percentage of promoters and detractors: Number of promoters / Number of total respondents * 100 Number of detractors / Number of total respondents * 100 Example: You have received a total of 100 responses on your survey. 30 respondents (detractors) chose 0 to 6, 30 respondents (passives) chose 7 and 8 and 40 respondents (promoters) chose 9 and 10. 40 promoters / 100 total respondents * 100 = 40% promoters 30 detractors / 100 total respondents * 100 = 30% detractors The second calculation step is the respective NPS equation: % promoters - % detractors = Net Promoter Score The Net Promoter Score can reach a maximum value of +100(%) if you receive 100% promoters and 0% detractors and passives or a minimum value of -100(%) if you receive 100% detractors and 0% promoters and passives. Let’s take a look at our previous example and calculate the Net Promoter Score. Example: We had 40% promoters and 30% detractors. 40% promoters – 30% detractors = 10(%) Net Promoter Score Note: There is broad uncertainty about whether the Net Promoter Score is displayed as a percentage or not. The fact is, there is no specific evidence so far to determine which is better. However, there are publications by the inventor of the NPS himself, Fred Reichheld, who specifies the NPS in percent, for example, see here which is why I decided to stick to percent. What is Considered a Good Net Promoter Score? This question is not easily answered or assessed in a standardised way despite being purely numeric in determination. As mentioned before, the NPS can range from -100 to +100. If you have an equal number of promoters and detractors, you will always end up with an NPS of exactly 0. Therefore, it makes sense to treat 0 as the mean NPS, making it an average score, neither very good nor bad. Anything below 0 should sound an alarm, since it indicates customer satisfaction levels are tending towards negative values, and an organisation’s products, services or processes require considerable improvement to avoid substantial customer churn. Obviously, strategy and efforts should be aimed at achieving the highest possible positive NPS score. According to global NPS standards, a score from 0 to 49 is considered “good”, a score from 50 to 69 is considered “excellent”, while a score of 70 and higher is considered “world class”. For benchmarking reasons, pages such as Customergauge.com offer great insights into well-known brands’ NPS results. For example, Tesla Motors currently has an NPS of 97, while Apple has an NPS of 89, Samsung, however, only manages an NPS of 70. Interestingly, the Apple iPhone has an NPS of only 55 and the Samsung Galaxy only 45, hence, making the overall brands more satisfactory from a consumer perspective than the companies’ products. Tip: If you are able to retrieve information on competitors’ or industries’ Net Promoter Scores, this may give you a good starting point to work towards gaining a competitive edge. Advantages and Disadvantages of the Net Promoter Score There are plenty of advantages of conducting a Net Promoter Score survey to gain knowledge on how satisfied your customers are: Setup and processing are easy and fast due to user-friendliness. NPS question is intuitive for most respondents. Shortness of survey reduces survey fatigue and results in better response rate. Studies by Satmetrix and Bain & Company have shown that NPS and revenue growth are correlated. There can be good benchmarking possibilities. Customer classification can be undertaken easily. There are also disadvantages to the Net Promoter Score: It is criticized as being too general and unspecific, as it doesn’t reflect the reasons for low satisfaction of the detractors. It’s a snapshot of the general satisfaction level, but lacks natural motivation and plan what to do with the attained data. It fails to predict future loyalty trend. Tip: if you feel you are not getting enough information out of your NPS question data, simply extend your survey by questions such as ”Would you elaborate on why you chose {0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10}” and ”Which changes would have to be implemented regarding company/product/service XYZ in order for your recommendation to increase by just one point?”, each with an open text box. These additional questions extend your NPS status quo by asking customers specifically for improvement areas and enabling concrete action to spur growth. LimeSurvey offers a Net Promoter Score Survey Template which includes the aforementioned questions. Since it’s a template, it is fully editable and serves as a general survey framework. If you want to give us feedback, comments, or suggestions regarding our Net Promoter Score survey template, feel free to send us an email. *Net Promoter Score is a trademark of Satmetrix Systems, Inc., Bain & Company and Fred Reichheld

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The evolution of surveys has kept up with the development of technology: going from door to door, mailing questionnaires out, calling people to complete phone interviews, using portable computers – and finally online surveys. Online surveys provide some obvious advantages such as reduced paper and administration costs. However, it makes sense to look a bit deeper into the differences between the two general options, online and offline surveys, especially with respect to the quality of the collected data. Quality of data The quality of survey results is made up of the right questions, representativeness of the examined group of interest, and the validity and depth of the answers. Error in your data can occur systematically due to biases, like researcher bias, survey bias, respondent bias and non-response bias, or randomly by misrepresentation. But it’s not just the accuracy of the data: Especially when surveying feedback on customers or an event experience or gathering new ideas and suggestions for improvement, the quality of free text fields are crucial for usable data. All those aspects are notably influenced by your choice of survey format. Response time and rates Online surveys most certainly produce quicker responses, since you can share the link to your survey immediately after creating it without having to call people, mail it to them or meet them in person. Offline surveys, on the other hand, usually produce higher response rates with in-person surveys being the most effective, followed by mail surveys. Online and email surveys still have a better response rate than telephone surveys. The height of response rates doesn’t necessarily translate to representation: If you want to represent the whole population of one country, you’ll need a much lower response rate than when you wish for feedback from a defined group. In a smaller group, you’ll get much smaller sample sizes and it’s much more likely to miss neutral responses and get more positive and negative results. Target group selection Most of the time, the lower response rates of online surveys can be compensated by being able to reach more people – even worldwide if you wish. With the right software you can run a survey in multiple languages of which the participants can select. If the survey has a specific target group or needs a certain frequency distribution in order to be representative, quota setting is a solution that can be used in survey software. A downside to online surveys is that random sampling is more difficult, since generating random email addresses like with phone numbers is not possible. That is not a problem if the group of interest consists of the members of a club, the students of a certain university, or registered customers to a shop. Otherwise panel companies can offer a solution to getting the wished sample size. The benefits of offline interviews include going to specific places after an event to reach specific people and also reaching the computer-illiterate population. Though the “online population” used to have special characteristics like being younger, better educated and more tech-savvy, the computer literacy has drastically increased in the last 15 years. Online surveys are thus reaching more and more people, whereas phone surveys, being still a popular medium of choice, are reaching less and less people, since households that have no landline are increasing, in particular with younger people. (Perceived) anonymity Especially upon addressing sensitive topics like smoking, drinking, sexual behavior, cheating on taxes or gambling, self-protective answering can be observed. This means the participant is not answering honestly, downplays or exaggerates his or her answer. It occurs especially with an interviewer present and even depends on factors like age, gender and ethnicity. But also when asking less sensitive questions, and instead about the experience with a product or event, the results might be biased by the presence of the interviewer in in-person interviews, since people may be more polite and less honest. This also applies to situations with an existing relationship of dependence, as often observed at universities, where the professor to be rated is present at the evaluation. Oftentimes people mistrust online surveys, when they are unsure of their data safety. Particularly if you want to prevent multiple participation, you either have to select setting cookies, saving the IP address or only allow access with a personalized token. All those options might prevent the participants from answering upfront or from answering at all, if you neglect assuring the participants of their anonymity and also choosing a software tool that allows anonymization as needed. This not only concerns the data accessible to the survey creators but also to the software provider. This is why the hosting and data storage should be at best on servers within countries with high data protection legislation like Iceland, Germany, the Netherlands or Spain. Other technical advantages Although the readability of black ink on white paper goes unchallenged, online surveys still win the victory in the design category. By not being restricted in space, it is not only possible to create a more appealing appearance with more coloring and implementation of pictures and videos, but also to provide unlimited space for free text entries. To keep participants interested, online surveys allow many options for personalization, including branching to only show relevant questions, piping to reuse answers or defining different end URLs. Though readability might be better in paper surveys, online surveys grant access to people with disabilities such as poor eyesight by being compatible with screen readers. On the researcher’s side deciphering handwriting is being skipped and less errors in data entry occur with online surveys. Interaction A special benefit of personal interviews arises when you want feedback to an event taking place or to ask for customer feedback immediately after the experience: Since the experience (and the excitement at best) is still fresh in their mind, the motivation to fill in a questionnaire might be higher, particularly in regards to open text fields. The interviewer bias, that has already been mentioned, can be utilized in a good way: From my own experience, a face to face interaction can be beneficial when you are looking for answers in form of free text fields. I learned that people often do not think of their opinion or thoughts as relevant, and so they’d rather skip a question than entering something they deem wrong. In personal interviews you can encourage those to share their experiences. If required, you can give further explanations or ask further questions when fitting. Although offline surveys immediately after the examined experience make a lot of sense, online surveys are still superior when it comes to time management. People are often reluctant to answering at all or fill out their questionnaire as quickly as possible if they feel pressured. Did you know? When creating questionnaires with LimeSurvey, you can have respondents take your questionnaire offline with no need for internet availability. The free Android app OfflineSurveys enables caching any LimeSurvey survey and collecting your data offline. Once the Internet is available again, the app can automatically synchronise the collected responses with your LimeSurvey system. Feel free to check it out here. Conclusion The question whether to choose an online or offline survey cannot be answered conclusively – and it does not need to be. The choice has to be made based on the particular cause depending on the survey goal and type, employee or customer feedback, academic research or feedback to an event. In many cases a combination of both might make the most sense, because that way you can also combine the benefits of both: broadly speaking, the quantity of online surveys with the quality of paper surveys and the combined accessibility of different target groups. LimeSurvey provides a convenient way to combine both: questionnaires that have been created online can be easily converted into a word document or a PDF file. The question display is thereby adjusted in order to be used in a written or personal interview. Afterwards the collected data can be entered manually into LimeSurvey, so that in the end both data sets can be analyzed collectively. All aforementioned features like multiple languages, data security, choosing the degree of anonymity and personalization of the survey design are also provided by LimeSurvey.

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Types of Survey Fatigue There is widespread consensus across the web that survey fatigue can be subdivided into two types, depending on when this state of fatigue is triggered. survey responding fatigue: This type of survey fatigue sets in before a potential respondent can even start taking a survey. The overwhelming number of survey invitations or frequency of survey reminders lead to a decline in attitude toward taking surveys. survey taking fatigue: This type of survey fatigue occurs while a respondent is in the midst of taking a survey. If a survey takes too much time and/or survey questions are complex and incomprehensible, the same decline in attitude toward continuing and completing a survey will be the result. Hence, survey fatigue will leave you either with no survey data or low-quality survey data to work with and, therefore, poses a giant risk to your research. Reasons For survey Fatigue There are numerous reasons that can lead to the aforementioned types of survey fatigue, some of which were already mentioned alongside the survey fatigue type. The following list of causes keep recurring in discussions and publications on survey fatigue. Surveys are too long: If participating in a survey takes too much time or consists of too many questions, people will lose interest, as their time is a precious resource. Questions are too long and complex: In line with the first reason, long and complex questions will require more concentration from the respondent and make it harder to understand how to proceed, thus resulting in the survey taking too long to complete. This will drastically increase bounce rates. Frequency of survey invitation/reminder is too high: Receiving too many survey invitations at once or receiving very frequent survey reminders can be overwhelming and frustrating for the recipient. Response rates will drop as a result of this. Questions are too sensitive in nature: This is especially applicable to personal and demographic questions. Respondents may not want to divulge private information and abandon the survey. Questions have little or no relevance to respondents: If a survey does not target the right audience, its topic will not be relevant to the respondents and evoke boredom. Nevertheless, there are ways and best practices of ensuring that survey fatigue can be avoided or at least minimised. Measures for Tackling Survey Fatigue Keep your survey short. Most people will avoid taking a survey that is longer than 5 – 10 minutes, as well as one more than 10 questions long. Keeping your survey short will help ensure that your respondents do not lose focus or interest. A good way of checking the length of your survey is to have someone else test it beforehand and time it. Create questions in simple language. Keep questions nice and short, avoid confusing or misleading question content, and abandon any double negatives or other ambiguous phrasings. Have someone revise the wording of your questions to make sure they are intelligible. Find the invitation sweet spot. Test the timing of your invitation and frequency of your reminder emails to find the ideal strategy to get people to take your survey. In most cases, this is a matter of trial and error. Know the privacy boundaries. Retrieving good and the proper amount of data is great, but you need to make sure not to cross your respondent’s personal boundaries when it comes to sensitive questions. Have someone check your questions to help ensure that they are appropriate to ask your respondents. Ask the right questions. If you’re targeting a specific audience with interests that should match the topic of your survey, make sure to stick to the point. If you’re mixing your survey (sub-)topics, split them into different surveys to get the best possible data from your respondents. If you’re not targeting a specific audience, your survey topic may quickly become irrelevant to your respondents. Offering certain incentives can help mitigate this problem. However, incentives must always be chosen with caution. Advanced Tip: Implement a question that asks for permission to get in touch with your respondents to discuss anything that was unclear and get feedback on the answers provided. As this is a voluntary declaration of consent, you have nothing to lose. To sum up, you can help avoid respondent survey fatigue by paying attention to these four keywords: Time, Relevance, Appropriateness, Comprehensibility, that’s all. Ready to go obtain some amazing survey data from your respondents?

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The question remains: why is a website is so incredibly important to companies. After all, they could simply stick to a web presence on social media platforms by maintaining a Facebook or Instagram page. According to Facebook statistics on Statista, social media platforms had more than 2 billion monthly active users in the last quarter. Statista also reports that Instagram had more than 1 billion monthly active users in the last month alone. These are some pretty impressive numbers. So, why do organisations still struggle with designing and building websites? It turns out, there are, in fact, a number of reasons. The Benefits of a Professional Business Website Unlike a social media business page, your website is your main communication channel with your prospective and actual customers, leaving it fully up to you how you use it to communicate. Platforms will specify certain guidelines and rules of conduct, as well as predefined features that allow you to communicate in restricted ways. Your website belongs to you. You carry responsibility, hence, you decide how it is used. Customer communication possibilities are endless, ranging from chats, forums, ticket systems, marketing campaigns, emails, surveys, phone contact, content in the shape of whitepapers and case studies and much more. In today's digitised world, the majority of online shoppers conduct searches and draw comparisons before purchasing products or booking services. In addition, the higher the investment in a product or service, the more extensive this research phase tends to be. It is, therefore, extremely important that you provide a website that remains greatly optimised for search engines to ensure that your pages will rank high on the search engine results page when someone is looking for your products and services. When it comes to search engine optimisation, you have many more possibilities and exposure when ranked with your own website as opposed to business pages on platforms. Your own website gives you full control over design, functions and content while lowering your dependence in terms of vulnerabilities and instabilities on other platforms. Full customisation and personalisation with regard to branding and website structure are great ways to emphasize your professionalism and company mission. Any website functions imaginable are possible with the appropriate code and can be implemented with your own preference and initiative. This gives you great power and flexibility to be creative with your site and, if necessary, redesign whenever you want. Two of the most crucial factors for winning new customers and retaining existing customers are trust and credibility. To ensure you are conveying a trustworthy and credible image outward, you require a professional, transparent and coherent website, as it is usually the first point of contact a prospective customer makes with your business and brand. You will then become a part of people’s brand awareness. And if you can subsequently impress with a great product or service experience to visitors who become customers, you will have a shot at becoming the top-of-mind awareness brand. A Website is a Never Done Once your website has been set up and is live, it is important to be aware that it will never be fully completed. There is always work to do. There are always changes to be implemented regarding the optimisation for search engine indexing, as well as for facilitating usability and improving user experience. Ways of boosting your search engine rank can be studied and applied by going through endless literature and content on search engine optimisation (SEO). However, making your website easier to navigate and access is a trickier endeavour. To truly understand how your visitors feel about the experience on your website, you will need to ask them first-hand. Our best suggestion? Run a website feedback survey on a frequent basis and get results about your website over time to identify weak points and determine the effectiveness of your implemented changes. We also have a great template you may use which we will walk you through in this article. Setting up a Website Feedback Survey There are several aspects of a website that need to be taken into consideration when considering its impact on visitors and customers, such as comprehensibility, aesthetics and navigation ease. We have incorporated all these vital aspects into our website feedback survey template to help ensure that you receive the well-rounded feedback necessary to improve your website. "How often do you visit our website?": This question aims at getting more data on the frequency of a person's website visits to determine the degree of familiarity with your page. The more frequently someone visits your website, usually the better these people know what it has to offer due to more and oftentimes longer page sessions. "How well do you rate the following aspects of our website?": This array question provides respondent feedback on the quality of many website essentials such as design, search function, navigation, content and more. This will give you an idea of which parts or functions are rated poorly and require some attention. "How easy was it for you to find what you were looking for on the website?": This question in combination with its follow-up question ("In the end, did you find what you were looking for?") help you learn what visitors think of the website navigation. The easier and more intuitive your website navigation, the easier it is for people to find what they are looking for. "How easy was it for you to understand the information on our website?": Content comprehensibility is the central concept measured with this question. If you cannot properly convey your message to website visitors, they will not convert to customers and simply disappear, probably without ever returning. Scoring high on all these questions will boost your website visitor experience and increase your sales, possibly even induce high-quality word-of-mouth potential. If you are offering a product or service that truly adds value to peoples' lives, it’s that simple - an amazing website experience will lead to substantial and long-lasting business growth. LimeSurvey offers a Website Feedback Survey Template which includes the aforementioned questions. Since it is a template, it is fully editable and serves as a general survey framework. If you want to give us feedback, comments or suggestions regarding our website feedback survey template, feel free to send us an email.

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Businesses, especially start-ups, are desperate “to start pushing for growth […] due to demands from taking venture capital or […] because the company needs to prove itself in order to raise capital, or generate revenue”* to survive. However, sustainable business growth requires a relevant company strategy which must not be ignored at the expense of fast and forceful growth initiatives. A company growth strategy should target not only short-term, but also long-term growth. Ultimately, any growth or strategy is contingent upon an organisation’s product or service and the market or customer it serves, i.e., the product-market-fit which is strongly impacted by the user experience (or UX). Often companies believe they know with utmost certainty which features or aspects of a product or service their customers will love; however, in most cases they are wrong. This is a core reason for 90% of all start-ups worldwide failing and, thus, going out of business. Fortunately, for larger organisations, this will not lead to survival issues. Nevertheless, deciding on the wrong strategies may also lead to immense financial crises in larger enterprises. So how do you close this knowledge gap in order to achieve optimal product-market-fit and spark the required growth? Re-evaluating Product-Market-Fit Whether a company has just been founded and is in the start-up phase trying to figure out its place in the market and the true value of its product or service for potential customers, or whether a company is an established market player acting in a highly dynamic and competitive surrounding that is driven by constant innovation and new product releases, there is a constant need to re-evaluate a company’s product-market-fit to ensure ongoing business growth. In order to determine your product-market-fit, the product needs to possess a must-have status, meaning the product requires certain characteristics that a large group of people would love. This group of people is a pool of potential customers to convert. More specifically, “why is a product must-have and who must have it?". In other words, what is a product’s core value, to which customers, and why?”* If a product has achieved the aforementioned must-have status, it becomes crucial to dig into user data to identify your product’s Aha! experience which will turn early customers into die-hard fans. The Aha! moment “is the moment that the utility of the product really clicks for the users; when the users really get the core value – what the product is for, why they need it, and what benefit they derive from using it”*, ergo matching the must-have product with the user’s perception and experience of the product’s value. The question remaining is how to find out whether your product is must-have and ultimately how it conveys the Aha! experience to your customers. Oftentimes, this is a tricky question to answer; however, a “must-have survey”* has been developed which can help address this challenge. This survey will ensure the collection of user feedback on customers’ product experience and evaluation of data for similarities, as well as patterns of how they use the product, i.e., in which way this generates the optimal value for them. Setting Up a Must-Have Survey The following survey questions are merely a framework for determining must-have status and the Aha! experience which were developed and successfully tested by Sean Ellis and Morgan Brown. Modifications of these questions and the adding of further questions can be undertaken according to a company’s individual goals and context. However, this short survey will prove to be an effective guide on how to get started when measuring crucial metrics by addressing several items relevant to growth. If the answer option “Very Disappointed” in question 1 hits a response rate of at least 40%, chances are extremely good that your product has a must-have status. 25% to 40% response rate for that same answer option require some minor modifications to the product or communication. Anything less than 25% of very disappointed respondents requires major modifications to the product or target audience. Whether a must-have level has been achieved within the first question or not, the remaining questions can give good insights on your users’ impression and satisfaction with your product. Question 2 can deliver insights about your chief competitor from you customers’ point of view as well as desirable features and services said competitor offers. Question 3 may point to aspects of your business you should be focusing on to maintain or improve for your customers. Question 4 is the well-known Net Promoter Score to assess your customer satisfaction by means of your recommendation or word-of-mouth potential. Question 5 may help you uncover fitting customer niches to target effectively, and last but not least, question 6 “can identify both glaring issues with the product that make it a nonstarter for broad adoption and opportunities to enhance the product that the company might not have thought of on its own”.* By analysing and evaluating your must-have survey data, you should get a good idea of who your target audience is, what the core value of your product is to this audience and why they are in need of your product. At the same time, your customers are reminded of the quality of your business which reflects in the Aha! experience with your product. Maintaining your growth momentum As has been described in the previous sections, a small amount of market research in the form of a customer must-have survey can ensure a more effective product-market-fit before (!) a complete public launch and hence contribute to more strategic short-term as well as long-term growth. It is, however important to maintain the aforementioned momentum in a highly dynamic and innovative business environment by frequently, e.g., annually, taking a step back to get feedback on the strategic direction you are heading in by those that matter most to you - your customers. *Sean Ellis & Morgan Brown (2017): Hacking Growth; Crown Business, US.

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Hence, a Likert scale is the sum of responses on several Likert options. When conducting a survey, the response on a Likert scale represents either the intensity of agreement to disagreement ("Extremely agree" vs. "Extremely disagree") with the question statement, making it a bipolar rating method, or the intensity of just an agreement or just a disagreement ("Extremely agree" vs. "Not at all agree" or "Extremely disagree" vs. "Not at all disagree") with the question statement, making it a unipolar rating method. It can be designed as an uneven-point scale, e.g., a 5-point or 7-point scale, with a neutral middle option, or as an even-point scale, e.g., a 4-point or 6-point scale, omitting a neutral option and forcing a more positive or more negative response choice. Either of these two options require full symmetry, i.e., ensuring bilateral symmetric distances from an existing or an imaginary neutral option and equal numbers of positive and negative options. How to Present Likert Scales in Online Surveys Ultimately, a Likert scale question may be arranged vertically or horizontally. However, there have been researchers investigating the possibility of something called a left-side bias when displaying a Likert scale question horizontally. Essentially, left-side bias means that when placing answer options on the left side of the Likert scale, there is a tendency among respondents to select these options, said tendency being somewhat stronger for positive options on the left side than negative options. Furthermore, there has been equivalent research showing a similar, yet even stronger selection bias for vertical Likert scales as respondents tend to skip lower displayed answer options and more often select the top options. Based on these statements, certain scale layouts appear more suitable to avoid survey bias and sloppy question answering than others. Horizontal Likert Scale: According to the Likert scale bias matrix, to keep the bias as low as possible in a horizontal order, it appears best to place negative attitude options on the left side of the scale and positive attitude options on the right side of the scale. Vertical Likert Scale: According to the Likert scale bias matrix, to keep the bias as low as possible in a vertical order, it appears best to place negative attitude options at the top of the scale and positive attitude options at the bottom of the scale. In addition, Likert scales can be modified to hold 7 or more answer options depending on the level of refinement that is required for a specific question or survey. Horizontal 7-point Likert Scale: Vertical 7-point Likert Scale: Creating Likert Scales in LimeSurvey There are several possibilities in LimeSurvey to create Likert scale questions either in a horizontal or a vertical order. To create horizontal Likert scales with text items, you may, for instance, use the array or array dual scale question types. To create vertical Likert scales with text items, you may, for instance, use the radio button list or the dropdown list question types. If you find it difficult to come up with Likert scale items, check out this marvellous overview of different Likert scale items that measure a variety of different attitudes. When to use Likert Scales? Likert scales have a variety of purposes and advantages when used in online surveys. They are ideal to capture attitudes, opinions, emotions and feedback on virtually any topic. Likert scales are thereby great to get very specific on a topic rather than getting lost in generic questions. Furthermore, Likert scales are universally applicable, easily evaluated and quickly completed by respondents, thus, avoiding survey fatigue.

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Over the years, contextual experiences lead to personal preferences, which explains why most people rank and have a favourite colour. Colours are highly attractive to us. They stimulate brain activity and are processed in the visual cortex’s colour centre of our brains. Furthermore, they are powerful influencers, as they can set a certain mood, induce physiological processes or trigger certain behaviours. In fact, there is a widespread consensus among researchers that colours are essential to fields such as marketing, market research, branding etc. So how does this colour psychology apply to survey design and survey-taking? Colours in surveys: beneficial or detrimental? Colours can be utilized in surveys in different ways and may evoke different emotional reactions. Font Colouring: adding colour to the font of your question texts or answer options Theme Colouring: customising the overall survey theme including, e.g., overall background colour, font colour, and question background colour Image Colouring: questions and answer options may both contain images and dispense with text altogether if desired These colouring options can be based on various motivations or goals. Logos with company colours, for instance, tend to aim at ensuring brand awareness and recognition. Organisational colours may dominate survey themes to elicit comfort and trust in respondents. Images within question texts or answer options may be used to visually simplify the effort for respondents when testing brand, packaging or advertisement alternatives. This is just a small fraction of possible areas where the use of colors can be applied. However, determining the extent of benefits or detriments is strongly case-dependent. Factors that determine whether colours in surveys lead to higher or lower response rates and better or worse response quality are characteristics like target audience culture, residence, age, gender. There are also other factors such as survey format, e.g., a market research survey or a survey in the form of a quiz, a survey with a goal such as data retrieval or a survey for entertainment purposes. Therefore, the question remains whether to use colours in surveys, and if so, how to use them. 6 tips for using colours in surveys As there is a lack of research dedicated to colour usage within survey design and its implications towards response rates and data quality, we can’t profess to know the right way to deal with colours when creating a survey, as there is no scientific evidence to back it. Nevertheless, we have gathered 6 valuable tips that can give you a good orientation for the usage of colours in surveys to ensure a more strategic approach. A/B Test: If you are not certain whether to integrate specific colouring into your survey or not, there is always the possibility of A/B testing. Set up the same survey in different variations, i.e., split a survey into one with colour options and another with a more neutral look and feel. Test these on two smaller subgroups of your sample group to get an idea which version performs better. Readability: It is essential that text in your survey is easy to read. The lighter the font colour the harder it becomes to read. If you decide to use font colours, select darker colours, as they facilitate readability. Minimalist Design: When in doubt, go for a minimalist design when it comes to using colours in surveys rather than a maximalist design. Too many colours and images may create a cluttered effect, which looks unprofessional. Colour Contrasts: Make sure to apply colour contrasts in case you are working with background colours and font colours at the same time. I.e., avoid using the same colour for both elements, otherwise the text might become partially or fully invisible. Colour Intuition: Avoid a response bias by making a conscious effort to not use colours in a misleading way. For example, a coloured response scale should go hand in hand with an intuitive colour distribution. I.e., a more positive response expression (e.g., “Strongly agree”) should use green colour shades and not red ones, and vice versa for a more negative response expression (e.g., “Strongly disagree”). Colour Harmonisation: From a design perspective, it makes sense to combine colours that harmonise well to maximise the quality of the survey feel. Shades of the same colour, for instance, will harmonise better than using two or more bright colours from different ends of the colour palette. Don’t forget to do your research! It is vital to do your homework before splashing colours around in your survey. Always bear in mind that colours can have completely different meanings in different countries and cultures. Hence, you have to be sensitive to your target audience's cultural background to avoid pitfalls and collect the best data possible in terms of quantity and quality. Fortunately, nowadays there is a wealth of information available on colours, cultures and psychology on the internet. For example, the creative platform Shutterstock, which provides images and videos to the public, has a good grasp on colours in media, as well as the emotional effects of colour, posted in a clear and insightful article on the Symbolism of colors and color meanings around the world. Check it out for yourself. Better safe than sorry! If you want more useful tips and information, simply subscribe to our newsletter