Designing Effective Web Surveys: The Importance of Design for Web Surveys

Design is choice Edward Tufte (2001, p. 191) Why a book on the Web survey design? This question really has three parts: (1) why Web , (2) why survey , and (3) why design ? I will try to address the three parts of this question in this chapter, but first I will briefly describe the major types of Internet and Web surveys prevalent today. This will set the stage for the discussion to follow. Internet and Web Surveys In the relatively short time that the Internet, and particularly the World Wide Web, has reached widespread penetration in the United States and elsewhere in the world, Internet or Web surveys have rapidly emerged as a major form of data collection. It's sometimes hard to imagine that Telnet was developed in 1987, and the first graphical browser (NCSA Mosaic) was released as recently as 1992 (see www.ncsa.uiuc.edu), given the attention that Web surveys are getting in the survey profession and research literature. The adoption of online surveys has spread faster than any other similar innovation, fueled in part by the dot-com frenzy of the late 1990s but also driven by the promise of faster and cheaper data collection. For example, according to ESOMAR's global research study conducted in 2001, an estimated 20% of the U.S. survey research market could be conducted online by 2002, reaching 35% by 2004 (see www.esomar.org).