How Many Yards Do You Commute To Work, And Other Badly-Measured Intervals.

I’m really sorry I’ve been so dormant lately.  I don’t really have an excuse, other than that I’ve been busy enough with other things that I haven’t been taking many online surveys, and as a result, I haven’t had anything to post.
Today, though, that changes. Hopefully for good? We’ll see.
So I watched an episode of [...]

Straightlining vs. Answering Your Stupid Question Honestly

OK, this is something I hadn’t thought of before.
When I’m staring at a bad survey question — asking me to compare two absolutely identical companies in a matrix, for instance — my tendency is to do this:

They’re equal. There’s no difference between Visa and MasterCard in my mind. Discover and American Express, those are different, [...]

Another Fine Matrix

First, look at this full-size. See how there are 14 brands of cat food going across the top? I already told it I’d never heard of five of them, and yet here they all are again. It’s one thing to ask me if I’ve ever heard of a brand and to then, even if I [...]

Needs Moar Choices.

Seriously? Shouldn’t they also have broken out high school by year, or something? Maybe included a radio button for each individual year from kindergarten through law school? No, really, I just can’t imagine how such fine distinctions are useful to anyone. Is someone really looking at this and saying, “Wow, the 7 respondents with some [...]

Blank = Zero

Can we please just all agree that blank = zero?
Greenfield, unsurprisingly:

Come on, guys. Stop making things hard for respondents. It’s not like you have enough of them to begin with.

Zogby Motorcycle Emptiness

What fresh hell is this? John Zogby has discovered the matrix? And somehow made it uglier than any other matrix in the history of research? All true, and more on that in a moment, but first, this unusual use of the ticky box:

That’s probably illegible unless you click on it, but the gist is I’m [...]

Adblock? Never heard of it!

Here’s what I saw on the first screen of a survey Food and Wine magazine wanted me to take:

(I entered my actual age for the question; I changed it to 99 for the screengrab.)
There’s no “continue” button here. I was initially hopeful that it was one of those speedy flash-based things that would zip me [...]

Is it me?

You really want me to think about whether or not any of these refrigerated products could best be described as being “warm?” Because, ew.)

Best Buy Has Some Issues

From this story at The Consumerist. I’m sure it’s just a browser rendering issue that would have been solved with more testing, but right now, it’s just one of my all time favorite matrixes:

Well done, Best Buy!

What are the Republicans Thinking?

For reasons completely beyond me, I’m on the Republican National Committee’s junk mail list. This morning, I received the strangely bad survey they’ve been taking to try to figue out what they’re doing wrong and what they can do to fix it.
Partisan feelings aside (for the moment), this isn’t a horrible idea; there’s nothing wrong [...]