Top beginner tips for designing effective surveys with Jisc Online Surveys
Well-designed surveys generate accurate, meaningful insight by keeping questions clear, engaging and unbiased. Here are practical tips to help you get started, and how Jisc Online Surveys can support you throughout.
Creating a well-designed survey is essential for generating high-quality, meaningful insight. Well-crafted surveys produce accurate, unbiased, and reliable data by using clear language, engaging formats, and thoughtful question design. They help maintain respondent interest, reduce confusion, and ensure that the insights gathered truly reflect the target audience’s views or behaviours. Ultimately, a good survey leads to valid conclusions and actionable insights that support informed outcomes.
Below, we’ve shared some practical tips to help you get started, along with ways Jisc Online Surveys can support you at each stage.
Set a clear survey aim
When building a survey, it’s important to consider the respondent’s experience and the reason for collecting the data. Imagine what you want your answers to look like but avoid making your questions too long or leading, to ensure the questions will yield clear, analysable answers that meet your research goals. If you have a long survey, you should consider breaking it up over multiple pages. This will make the survey easier for the respondent to complete.
Ask yourself what are you hoping achieve? What is the bigger picture? How will your questions generate the most impactful data for your outcomes? Narrowing down what you want the survey results to solve or answer is key to a succinct, manageable survey with accurate and insightful responses, but make sure you don’t bias the results with leading questions.
Know your audience
Not every survey needs to reach your full student or staff community. Targeting a specific group often leads to more actionable outcomes. Focussing on a particular segment of your audience will ensure that you will be able to action your findings better.
For example, when considering product satisfaction, do you want to understand opinions of those who are paying the bills, those required to set-up and maintain a service, or those who are using the product?
Who is your primary audience and therefore who do you want to survey. Depending on who you’re surveying, your questions and the language you use may need to vary considerably. Your audience can also influence your wider research approach as some groups may be harder to reach or smaller in number, which can affect the method you choose and how you distribute your survey.
Jisc Online Surveys supports respondent tracking so you can monitor participation and send timely reminders. You can set access controls to ensure only your intended audience can respond, and use unique links that pre-populate known information, helping you streamline your survey and reduce unnecessary questions.
Write effective questions
There are many online resources to support with designing a great survey and writing unbiased, necessary questions. A few top tips and places to start include:
- Only ask one question at a time
- Use simple language -no jargon!
- Keep questions brief and to the point
- Avoid leading questions
- Use balanced scales where possible
- Favour close-ended questions
- Allow an ‘other’ option.
Get test responses from colleagues
It’s important to ask colleagues to test your survey before sending it out to ensure clarity, relevance, and usability. Their feedback can help identify confusing wording, leading questions, or gaps in logic that might affect your data quality.
Testing also confirms whether the survey captures the information you need and whether the responses will be easy to analyse. This step reduces the likelihood of needing follow-up surveys or edits once the survey is live. With online surveys you can duplicate a survey for test purposes to ensure that you can review each stage of the survey before sending it out.
Branding and presentation
Whether you want to align with your organisation’s brand, create colour coding, or just want to make a more engaging experience for your respondents, customisation within online surveys gives you greater control over your survey’s appearance.
You can add images and logos to your surveys to make them more engaging and to supply relevant survey imagery. Just go to your survey’s Display settings page to add a logo, select a theme colour or change the display language.
You might also want to emphasise something in your question text, so make sure to utilise the formatting options in the text editor.
You can:
- Make text bold.
- Make text italicised.
- Make text underlined.
- Strikethrough text.
Utilise the preview function
And finally, preview your survey before you finalise it. The preview function on the online surveys platform will allow you to view your survey from the perspective of your participants. During the preview stage, it’s good to imagine you’re the survey taker and ask yourself if the user journey is coherent, the questions seem ordered correctly and logically, and if there are any typos or errors in your question content.
Consider data use and privacy
Be clear about how you will handle personal data and ensure you are compliant with local and relevant regulations (e.g. UK GDPR).
Make use of Analyse for reporting
Once you have launched your survey, you can start analysing your responses as soon as they come in so you’ll be building a picture of your results early on, which can also help if there are any early issues in your survey.
Navigate to the Analyse area of your survey by choosing Analyse on the sidebar menu. As a default, you’ll be taken to the Overview page, which contains charts for each of your questions and had tools for you to filter or export your responses.
Find out more
Join us in Birmingham for Data Matters on 21st January 2026. It’s the must-attend event for senior leaders in education, research and the public sector who have a responsibility for data strategy, AI or institutional transformation.
We offer comprehensive support for online surveys including regular webinars, training, a community of practice, and detailed guidance.