Research SurveyChecklist

This checklist is designed for:

• UX researchers planning surveys
• Product managers running discovery or validation
• Designers collecting directional input
• Founders and early teams without research support
• Consultants working at scale across markets

You do not need to be a survey expert to use this tool. It exists to prevent the most common (and costly) survey mistakes.

Most surveys fail silently.

They collect data but fail to:

• Answer a real decision
• Represent the right users
• Produce interpretable results

Common failure modes include:

• Vague objectives → scattered questions
• Overlong surveys → rushed or careless answers
• Opinion-heavy questions → misleading confidence
• Poor screening → wrong participants

This checklist exists to act as a pre-flight system catching risks before the survey goes live.

Use this tool:

• Before launching any research survey
• When reviewing a draft created by others
• When survey results need to support real decisions
• When working with large or diverse respondent pools

It is especially valuable for remote, unmoderated research, where you can't course-correct live.

Each section represents a risk category in survey research:

• Clarity risk
• Structure risk
• Question bias risk
• Accessibility risk
• Sampling risk
• Ethics and trust risk

Your goal is to eliminate avoidable risks before collecting data.