The document discusses visual design considerations for survey design, including: 1) Goals of maximizing reward for participants while minimizing costs, reducing errors and biases. 2) Cognitive and visual processing steps respondents go through. 3) Ensuring clarity through proper use of formatting, fonts, colors, spacing and screen sizing for different devices. 4) Considering audiences that may have limited bandwidth.

1. Survey Design Issues:
Visual Design
CARMA Internet Research Module
Jeff Stanton

2. Visual Design: An Introduction
May 15-17, 2008 Internet Data Collection Methods (Day 2-2)

3. Goals of Design
• Maximize reward to the participant while
minimizing cost: show respect while highlighting
the importance of accurate and complete
response
• Reduce the chances of erroneous responses,
eliminate extraneous influences that may bias
responses
• Translated into visual design and interaction
design: Aesthetics, clarity, simplicity, ease of use,
proper sequence/flow, error minimization,
missing response minimization
May 15-17, 2008 Internet Data Collection Methods (Day 2-3)

4. Stimulus Processing Steps
• Perceiving
• Attending
Visual
• Comprehending
• Retrieving
Cognitive
• Deciding
• Reporting Motor Motivational
May 15-17, 2008 Internet Data Collection Methods (Day 2-4)

5. Visual Gestalt
• What am I supposed to do next? What
information informs the next step? What is my
range of action?
• Gestalt grouping principles: Proximity, similarity,
connectedness, regionality, continuity, closure
May 15-17, 2008 Internet Data Collection Methods (Day 2-5)

6. Color: Bland or Bold?

7. Graphic Elements

8. Edward Tufte: PowerPoint Phluff
Also see: http://norvig.com/Gettysburg/

9. Spacing, Blocking, and “Straightlining”

10. fOnTs
• Plain text generally easier to read than italicized and
serif easier than sans-serif; proportionally spaced
easier than fixed space
• Use left justification with ragged right for passages of
two lines or more
• Black print on top of off-white background the best:
medium to medium high contrast
• Avoid light colored or white text on dark backgrounds
• Avoid intense/saturated coloring of characters under
all circumstances
• Short wavelength colors (blues and purples) harder to
focus and discern for both characters and line art

11. Screen Size
• Notebook and laptop computers range from 1024x768 (4:3) to
1920x1200 (8:5)
• iPad (1 and 2): 1024 X 768 pixels
• iPhone: 320 pixels wide by 480 pixels high
• Blackberry ranges from 160 x 160 up to 324 x 352
• Nokia phones from 176 X 208 up to 352 X 416
• Tablets and many phones permit orientation reversal where a page may
appear in landscape or portrait mode
• Designing survey pages to fit these different resolutions and maximum
sizes generally calls for compact, focused pages that contain just a few
related items and response scales and that minimize scrolling
• Choosing a survey package that can serve different styles of pages based
on the kind of device that is requesting the page; Example: Qualtrics
provides a mobile application back-end that recognizes the device

12. Audiences, Bandwidth,
and Page Load Time
• While workplace, school, and home computers often have
high speed connections to the Internet there are still
populations with highly limited bandwidth:
– People in rural locations that still depend on dialup or 3G
– Technology users in developing countries that may lack high
speed network infrastructure
– Mobile users including travelers, students
– Users in hotels, cafes, and other locations that offer wifi to large
groups of people
• Because some of these groups may be responding to your
survey, page load time can still be an important factor;
graphical page backgrounds, logos, graphics, still
pictures, and videos all require fast Internet connections