How To Humanize A Survey

Hilary Corna
5 min readMar 16, 2021

People don’t see what’s in it for them.

Many lose interest halfway through and leave, thinking it’s a waste of time.

It’s a truth that’s universally acknowledged: surveys aren’t fun. The typical response rates for surveys range between 5% to 30%. People often feel like answering one is a chore, and this is to be expected when most surveys are created with very little effort to make it engaging, from the visual design to the language used.

Surveys shouldn’t look or feel like a test. Asking your customers or employees about their experience should also be an experience. This is where humanizing a survey comes in. Humanizing a survey will make it feel like more of a conversation instead of a set of questions that they feel forced to answer.

Don’ts When Humanizing A Survey

1. Boring Survey Design

One of the most common mistakes people make is not taking time to make their survey visually appealing. A cold and boring survey design does not compel people to be interested enough to respond or stay long enough to complete your survey. In contrast, a well-designed survey is likely to get a 40–60% response rate.

Lack of creativity translates to the consumer not feeling like their experience is special, and as a result…

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Hilary Corna

CEO | Founder of The Human Way | Bestselling Author | New book #UNprofessional out 9/21 | Host of the UNprofessional podcast | As seen in Forbes, Fortune, WSJ