Ranking question examples
- Put these features in the order you want us to build them.
- Rank what matters most when you choose a supplier: price, speed, quality, support.
- Order these workshop topics from most to least useful for your job.
- Rank the benefits by how much they would affect your decision to stay.
Ranking vs rating: which to use
| Ranking | Rating scale | |
|---|---|---|
| Answer | An order of items | A score per item |
| Ties | Impossible | Common |
| Shows | Relative priority | Absolute opinion |
| Effort | Higher, grows with list length | Lower |
Rate when you need to know whether something is good. Rank when you already know everything is fine and must choose what comes first. A ranking cannot tell you that all items are bad; the last place is still somebody’s least bad option.
How to analyse ranking data
average rank = sum of positions given to an item ÷ number of respondents who ranked it
lower average rank = higher priorityAdd the first-place count next to the average: an item that half the people put first and half put last has a middling average but a very different story. For deeper analysis, compare average ranks between segments, such as new and long-standing customers.
How many items can people rank?
Four to seven works comfortably. Beyond about seven, people rank the top and bottom with care and shuffle the middle at random. For a list of 10 to 20 items use pairwise comparison, which only ever shows two at a time, or ask for the top three with a multiple choice question.
Mistakes with ranking questions
- Mixing items of different kinds (a feature, a price, a colour) in one list.
- Reading average ranks as distances: first and second may be close, second and third far apart.
- Not saying which end is the top (“1 = most important”).
- Ranking items the respondent has never used, which produces confident-looking guesses.
Ranking on a phone
Dragging is the hard part on small screens, so keep item labels short enough to fit on one line and the list short enough to fit on one screen. If people have to scroll while holding an item, they settle for “good enough” and let go. Six short items is the comfortable ceiling for mobile traffic.
Building it in Askyo
The Ranking block needs at least two items and starts with four sample ones. Respondents drag items by the grip handle, on a phone with a finger; the list can also be sorted from the keyboard. Each item shows its current number. The answer is saved after the first drag, so a respondent who agrees with the starting order still has to move something.
Analytics shows the average position of every item (the bars are inverted, so the top priority has the longest bar), how many times each came first, and any items left unranked. In the CSV export a response reads “1. Speed; 2. Price; …”.
What you can set
- the list of options