Resources

What are they?

Sliders are a fab way to visualise the answer someone is giving. Instead of clicking a button, they can grab a button and drag it to their desired answer. This is a really great way to break up the monotony of a survey as its more interactive than other question types. You might use sliders to ask questions like “how far would you travel to pick up a delivery” or “what percentage of your salary do you spend on eating out.”

In the ex-plor platform

We have three distinct versions of sliders:

• Participants can drag a point across a line, which can then represent hours in a day or perhaps distance they’d be willing to travel.
• There is also a slider with scaled points, which could be utilised to convey how strongly a respondent agrees, or used as a rating system. This uses a predefined scale, where the slider “snaps” to points.
• We can even build custom designed sliders, such as a semi-gauge style slider. This could represent completeness of a task or be employed as part of a rating system, making the survey more engaging as a twist on traditional slider.

Top tips

There’s an argument that says in having to pull a slider along, you may get more accurate data than say radio buttons which may be selected at random.

There will always be some degree of ambiguity when using scale. Try and indicate beyond terms like ‘strongly agree’ as to what the scale represents.

Sliders can be used as a different and innovative way to capture information, but should be used sparingly and certainly not for every single question.

Don’t forget

Variety is the spice of life and wherever possible you should try and use a mix of different question types to keep any survey engaging!