Four things you can do right now to improve the survey experience

People don't like taking online surveys, and I don't blame them. Too often the survey is long, the questions are confusing, the answer choices don't make sense, and I have no idea how the research company obtained my contact information. I have heard more than one person say they would rather get a root canal than take a 30 minute survey. 

Maybe one day we will find a better way to collect data, but until we can get rid of surveys we must find ways to improve surveys. Here are four things you cand do right now to improve to the user experince.

1. Stop recruiting panelists through Lead Gen because the Lead Gen model is based on spam/scams.
2. Let respondents choose how and how much they want to communicate with you, and then respect those choices. If someone gives you their email address in a registration form but they indicate they only want to be invited to surveys through your survey widget, it's not OK to send them email.
   
3. Make surveys shorter and easier to interact with. People don't care about the research rationale behind a discrete choice question with 50 options, or a scalar question with 30 attributes. It's our job to figure out how to make those things easier on the respondent and online users have exponentially less tolerance for this kind of thing.
   
4. Write questionnaires that make sense to a respondent. Most questionnaires I read sound like the researcher is trying to impress her friends and clients.