When creating a survey, there are many elements necessary to achieve accurate responses, including how the questions are worded and how the forms are distributed. But in addition to creating the most clear questions, businesses and organizations can also design a survey to be appropriate for form recognition software. The easier it is for a data entry service to read and analyze survey data, the faster a business can receive the results. So, in addition to making the questions on a survey ideal for the audience, an AIIM blog post gives some suggestions to make survey design ready for survey scanning and processing.
First, author Shane Cooper explains, optical character recognition and intelligent character recognition must distinguish between different colors on a form. The more colors, and the similar shades of a color a form has, the harder it is for a machine to differ between the words on a page. To avoid this, consider using just black and white or as few colors as possible to make scanning survey forms as easy as possible.
Optimal density is also an important aspect of good survey designs. The more words on a page, and the closer they are together, the harder time a machine will have when picking out and reading text.
Unsurprisingly, bad quality can also keep a scanner from properly reading the page.
“Poor quality leads to false positives and nearly impossible keyword location and data extraction,” Cooper said. “If the pixel count is too low, the letters, words and shapes will be obscured through pixilation that makes it nearly impossible to ascertain usable data.”
To create a good survey design, data entry services can help companies create and process forms to receive information as efficiently as possible.
Tab Service Company is a Chicago based company with over 53 years of experience as a data processing service provider. We provide business with outsourcing solutions for document scanning services, data entry services and mailing/lettershop services. As a SOC2-approved service organization, we apply industry-best practices to our approach with clients.