Your opinion is down the hall, first door on the right
Last week, I asked a waiter for directions to the bathroom. He pointed and said, "Straight back, on your right." Then he took a few steps with me to make sure I was looking at the right door.
Five words. A quick check. Zero chance of ending up in a storage closet.
The waiter did exactly what a survey should do: guide people to where they need to be.
Like a busy restaurant, the mind is full of side rooms we’re not aware of until someone points us toward them. Good surveys work not by assuming you know where your opinions live, but by bringing you to them.
I was thinking about that kind of guidance while I was building a survey for an agency ahead of a pitch last summer. They needed help figuring out what frustrates people about their fantasy sports platforms.
Most researchers would ask a question like this:
Q: How satisfied are you with the platform you use for your fantasy league?
• 1 - Very unsatisfied
• 2 - Somewhat unsatisfied
• 3 - Neither satisfied nor unsatisfied
• 4 - Somewhat satisfied
• 5 - Very satisfied
If you pick “4 – somewhat satisfied,” you’d then be asked to explain why.
On paper, this looks reasonable. In practice, it steers you toward a scale you’d never use, then asks you to justify a number you only picked because you had to. It’s like ending up in the storage closet and then being asked why you decided to go there.
Instead of forcing people onto a satisfaction scale, I wrote a question to surface pain points, if any existed.
Q: What do you think about your fantasy sports platform?
• It’s good, I like it
• It’s good, but it has some issues
I know survey purists will object: both answers assume the platform is good.
That was intentional. I wasn’t trying to pin sentiment to a number. I was trying to identify who had pain points, and then hear what those pain points actually were.
When I ran the survey, most people chose “It’s good, I like it.”
The rest selected “It’s good, but it has some issues.” Those respondents were then shown a simple follow-up: “What are the issues?”
Because they’d already been guided to that part of their experience, the question felt natural. They weren’t explaining a number. They were just describing what they were already looking at.
From that group came a clear set of pain points that shaped the pitch’s messaging—and helped the agency win.
Standard survey design is like the waiter who waves vaguely and says “back there somewhere,” leaving you to figure it out. When people guess their way through, they may answer—but not from the room you actually care about.
In my Survey Roasts, I help brands and agencies write questions that give people a clear route through their own thinking, just like the waiter gave me a clear route to the bathroom.
The result is people telling you what's actually in their heads instead of making something up.
If that sounds useful to you, book a Survey Roast today.
Send me your draft, and for $145 I’ll record a 15‑minute Loom with copy‑and‑paste edits and suggestions that improve your survey’s flow and data quality.
Cheers,
Sam