Suspend and Resume Feature

Many survey applications offer the ability to allow respondents to start an interview, quit in the middle, then come back and pick up right where they left off. Recently I participated in a survey that presented this the wrong way.

The survey I completed actually had a "Quit" button on every page. It looked a little bit like this:

I couldn't believe my eyes. Our industry is facing all-time low response rates, and here I was, being presented with an advertisement to quit the survey on every single page.

Would you train a telephone interviewer to ask respondents "would you like to quit now and finish this later" after every question? Of course not. Your dropout rates would be through the roof.

Using a suspend/resume feature is a great idea in most online survey situations. Mention this option in the invitation, but do not remind them on every page that it's okay to stop the interview. Instead, program your survey in such a way that if a respondent quits by any means (such as closing their browser window) and returns to the survey at a later time, they're automatically directed to the spot in the questionnaire where they left off.