Question types on Remesh
One of the most important things you can do on the Remesh platform is to ask interesting, insightful questions. Here are some recommendations to help you ask the best questions possible:
- Onboarding Polls are asked before the session actually begins so those won't count towards your session time. These polls can either be single-select (participants can select only one poll option) or multi-select (participants can select as many options as they'd like). These polls can be things like age, gender, tenure, etc. but feel free to create questions that are more specific to your topic as well. The idea here is that these polls questions will provide you the information you need to filter/segment the group.
- Speaks are any statement (instructions, pleasantries, feedback, etc.) that the participants do not respond to. Because Remesh is all text-based, Speaks can really help things to feel more conversational and help with the flow of the session by setting context and communicating informally with the group. For example, you can include Speaks such as "Thanks so much for your responses! This is very helpful information. Now I'm going to ask you a few questions about ___."
- Ask Opinion questions are open-ended questions to which the participants respond in their own words. Once participants enter their response, they are guided through two voting exercises. The first is a binary vote where they are shown two responses submitted by participants in the group and select the one they agree with more. The second is a singular vote where they are shown one response submitted by a participant in the group and asked whether they agree or disagree with the response. These data points help our machine learning algorithm understand how the group feels about each response. We recommend 2 minutes for these questions, and between 1.5 - 2.5 minutes is generally a good range.
- Ask one succinct question rather than two questions in one. For example, instead of asking 'How would you describe this product design and why would you describe it that way?'. You should ask two separate questions to the group: one for the 'How', one for the 'Why'
- Be detailed and clear in each question you ask
- Ask Experience questions are also open-ended. Use Ask Experience when you're asking participants to answer with something personal or when the traditional voting exercises may be a little tricky for participants to complete. Unlike the ask opinion question, after the participants respond to the question, they do not go through the voting. Instead, you have the option to set up categories. After participants submit their free-text response, they will select which of the categories they feel their response best fits into. Participants can only select from the categories you set up and are not able to type an alternative category. That being said, you can include an "Other" category if you'd like, but participants still will not be able to type in an option if they select "Other." We recommend 1 - 1.5 minutes for these questions. You can also disable the categories so participants would only submit a free-text response but would not categorize their response after they hit submit.
- Only use when asking participants for personal anecdotes or when you do not want responses to be seen by other participants.
- There is NO voting on these responses.
- Categories are optional but can be helpful when it comes to organizing responses
- There are no agreement scores, common topics, or highlights for this type of question
- Polls can be either single-select or multi-select. Keep Polls around 30-seconds each. If you have a lot of options to choose from or a multi-select Poll, you may want to increase the question time
- Polls will work best if a question can be answered as a close-ended answer like 'yes' or 'no'
- Use a Poll then an Ask if you need to ask two related questions. This way, you can segment the response to the Ask based on how the participants answered the previous Poll
Best Practices:
Imagine potential answers in your mind to help judge how effective the question is. Remember that all participants will be asked to respond to each question you send to the group. When asking probing questions, try not to be too pointed or to direct questions to one specific segment of the participants. You want to make sure everyone feels like they can respond to the questions appropriately.
Be detailed and direct in how you ask questions, but try not to dictate how participants should respond. Remember that the participants are humans, so providing lengthy 'instructions' for how to respond to each question may be confusing and lead to lower quality responses.
