Respondents increasingly use mobile smart phones to take web-surveys we design for a PC viewing environment. Maritz and Decipher observe lower completion rates on surveys accessed on mobile devices and we posit two reasons for this: 1)respondents on mobile devices are more likely to be distracted by activities outside of the survey than respondents who are seated in front of a PC and 2)surveys have not been optimized for mobile devices so less sophisticated mobile browsers and smaller screen sizes combine to provide respondents with a less pleasurable survey experience. While researchers do not have much control over the environment in which a respondent receives a survey invite, there may be ways to improve web survey design for mobile respondents to offer a better survey experience. In this research we address several survey design questions:
• Given that some previous research suggested that respondents scroll vertically more readily than horizontally, will we get better results from mobile web respondents if we arrange scales vertically instead of horizontally?
• We see grid questions appearing to cause terminations among our mobile web respondents. Is this a function of the difficulty of the grid format or would we see the same drop off if we break a k-item grid into k separate questions?
Using a multi-cell test-retest design, we seek to answer the questions above, assessing our rating scale treatments in terms of:
• Completion rates
• Construct validity
• Similarity of PC web and mobile web responses
• Individual question and overall survey completion times
• Test-retest reliability
• Self-reported respondent experience
• Perceived and actual survey length.