Progress Bar Page Numbers

Progress bars are a common part of modern day surveys, and added to most online surveys. They are designed to reduce survey dropout – by showing people how much time is remaining, it’s believed that they will be more inclined to continue to the survey until its completion. Whether or not this is the case isn’t entirely clear.

Most studies do confirm that progress bars reduce survey dropout, but the effects may not be as substantial as people believe. Still, it is considered a best practice to make sure that you have a progress bar to let those taking the survey know how long they have remaining.

Progress bars can be posted with or without corresponding page numbers. The idea behind page numbers is to know what the progress bar corresponds to. When the progress bar moves forward, page numbers tell the person how much that distance represents and whether or not they are much closer to completion.

Page numbers can also cause a problem. They can cause a feeling of defeatism – the idea that you’re not moving far enough, so perhaps you should simply drop out of the survey early and stop wasting your time. Page numbers may: Make the survey seem even longer than it is, especially if there are many pages Cause an immediate drop off for those that find the page numbers intimidating Be very misleading if there is skip logic involved The last one is important.

Sometimes a survey with a lot of page numbers may not be long at all, and may only seem like because there are a lot of questions programmed in. But if you use skip logic like the SurveyMethods software provides, a user may not see all of those questions – especially if they’re not relevant.

It’s with that in mind that you may want to consider removing page numbers, to not let users know exactly where they are or intimidate them. But removing page numbers may also not be the right idea. Perhaps you have very few pages, and you want your users to see that there are few pages so that they’re motivated to complete them.

Or perhaps you do not care about survey drop off and simply want to avoid frustration. Page numbers do tell people where they are in the survey so there are no surprises or added frustration. Page numbers may or may not have an effect on your survey, and it’s important to at least keep them in mind when you run your survey.

If you’re not sure whether page numbers should be involved, try running surveys with large samples and see how high the drop off rate is. Otherwise, make sure you’re thinking about what the respondents are seeing and feeling when they take your survey, as they are the ones that need to answer correctly for you to get your research.