10 Survey Challenges and How to Avoid Them

Summary: Response biases make it difficult to create good surveys. Follow these tips to counteract 10 of the major survey response biases and improve your survey data.

How recently have you been invited to take some kind of survey? It likely hasn’t been more than a couple of days.

Our research shows that surveys are among the most commonly used research methods by UX practitioners. Surveys have their place among the various quantitative UX-research methods , but it is more challenging to create a good survey than many professionals think. It is very easy to write a bad survey that gathers flawed data.

Limitations of Surveys

Unlike observational methods , which reveal real-time behaviors that cannot be easily faked or filtered (such as the ease or difficulty of navigating a new mobile app), surveys are self-reported – which means that respondents get to filter everything they share with researchers before they share it. This is a major limitation of surveys, no matter how well they are written — because researchers are generally interested in phenomena as they really occur , not in (intentionally or unintentionally) censored information. Other self-report research methods where users can decide what they share include interviews , focus groups , and diary studies .