Bold, creative, fast insights requires not only high quality respondents, but effective and efficient quality control methods. If you use untruthful data, you or your clients are ultimately being misguided in the business decisions that you are basing off of these facts and figures. So, what can we do to avoid this and drive ‘quality’ into the right direction?

2018 is a new year for data. This year, stop painstakingly sifting through data sets looking for straight-liners, gibberish open-ends and other signs of disengagement. Take control of your insight’s quality by not only selecting a high-quality panel partner with added layers of quality control, but with best practice survey elements.

5 Survey Design Best Practices For Data Quality 

1. Trap your speeders

Why spend time cleaning respondents who finished your survey too fast after the fact when you can apply simple programming to terminate them real-time?

2. Add in a red herring

If you’re adding in a grid series, save your future self some time and add in a red herring within the series. Catch the disengaged respondents in action.

3. Think mobile

Today, time-poor consumers are taking surveys on mobile devices. Optimized your survey for all devices with your design to engage respondents.

4. Ask the right questions

Phrase your open-ended questions properly for maximum quality. Be creative with your wording to elicit more emotive responses.

5. KISS…Keep it simple, surveyors

Modern respondents want short, engaging surveys. Try Twitter’s '140 characters or less' rule when writing questions, and keep the overall length under 15 minutes. If you want engaged respondents from start to finish, don’t bore them.

By implementing these five techniques into your designs, you will not only minimize the manual labor needed to clean your data sets, but increase engagement. This will limit the need for cleaning in general. Make 2018 the year you discover truth through data.