7 ways to get the most from your Website poll

A Website poll can be a fantastic way to get visitors to interact with your Website whilst providing you with valuable user opinion in the process.

Here are 7 ways to ensure you don’t waste any of your valuable online real estate in the process.

Your Website poll should:

• Not interrupt the user.
  Don’t interrupt the user’s experience with a pop up which you shove in their faces. Encourage them to discover the poll by all means but allow them to choose to participate. Guess how accurate the answers will be anyway if the user doesn’t want to take part…
  
  
• Have a purpose.
  You want information which you can use to help you in some way such as sell more of a product, get more people interested in a service you offer or test the market with a new offering you are considering. Why distract your users if the information you acquire won’t be of practical benefit to you?
  
  
• Be easy for users to answer.
  People’s time is precious. Making them have to think about a complicated answer is more likely to result in them not bothering to take part as they rush to read your content or, worse yet, explore another site.
  
  
• Be unambiguous.
  Make sure the question can be answered without users wanting to select more than one option or wanting to answer, 'that depends…’.
  
  
• Not have too many options.
  Too many options will make what should be a relatively quick and simple interaction into something too tedious and irritating for people to care about. Imagine being asked to please choose your favourite holiday location from the following 500 options…
  
  
• Be interesting.
  If the question or topic, or both, are not interesting then why would anyone bother to answer it? Remember that you are getting the users valuable opinion (and even more valuable time) in exchange for their curiosity as to the other results or their desire to have a say in the matter. Both reasons involve them being interested in the first place.
  
  
• Be of practical benefit to you via the results.
  Don’t collect data from lots of your visitors only to discover that from the results you can’t determine what they actually want. If you asked; What colour do you prefer: green, blue or other? and 50 people answer ‘other’, you are no further forward in understanding what their favourite colour is.

An example Website poll can be seen on the right-hand side of the pages of the main Website.

Question: In the last six months, how often have you added new content to your website?

Results: You can view the simple stats by clicking 'results' on the poll or you can visit the detailed results here: http://www.quanticdesigns.co.uk/poll_report/index.cfm

If you would like Quantic to set up a Website poll and results on your Website then please get in touch.