When the first draft of the online survey is ready for review, the survey programmer sends a test link over the to researcher for feedback. Researcher then tests the survey and sends comments back to the survey programmer. It's a circulated process between survey programmer and researcher communicating on the changes to the survey.
Through user research, we discovered that
1. The survey testing and reviewing process frequently involves heavy collaboration between the researcher and the survey programmer. Researcher and programmer are communicating over emails with a Microsoft Excel™ document (so called Change Log) circulated many times over as each party provides their input.
Example Excel document:
2. In a Market Research agency, researcher also shares the test link with the client to get clients' feedback. The feedback process between the researcher and client is happening over a video call, or emails.
3. Once both client and researcher provide final approval, the survey programmer then would need to implement the agreed changes into an online survey as the final version.
What are being reviewed and tested:
Text
Look&feel (layout, theme, colours, font, logo...)
Question appearance, whether it should be a dropdown, radio buttons or slider.
Survey logic
Validation, whether the question is required or not
Desktop view/ Mobile view
Translations (translations are usually being reviewed at the last round)
Mapping out the journey
Getting feedback on the survey using survey comments
In order to smoothen and simplify the communications between all 3 parties, we came up with a survey commenting feature to allow all parties to communicate on the survey.
Mapping out the commenting flow chart between the survey programmer and reviewer
Any reviewer with the test link of the survey would be able to test the survey and give comments to each of question.
Reviewer frequently tests the survey on mobile. The commenting feature is also available on the mobile view.
Survey programmer will be notified when there are new comments. The comments panel will be opened on the side of the survey editor allowing the programmer to read the comments and make the changes in one place.
Commenting allows the survey programmer to know exactly where in the survey people have issues, and to react to those issues, e.g reply to the thread or mark the thread as resolved.
Since everyone can see each other’s comments, it’s easy to gain consensus about what’s working and what’s not.
Future improvements
Due to the security reasons, the reviewer's experience is quite limited at the moment. There have been considerations to introduce proper user authentications for the reviewers, so that we could provide richer, and more engaging features, such as allowing the reviewers to re-edit or delete their own comments, re-open or sign off a comment thread.