Free Likert Scale Creator

With the right tips, tricks, and tools, creating a Likert scale survey isn’t difficult. Here’s how to do it in four simple steps:

Identify the survey’s audience and purpose

When you’re creating a Likert scale survey, you first need to define your audience and purpose. Who will receive and complete your Likert scale survey? What are you hoping to learn from or accomplish with your Likert scale survey results?

Say, for example, you recently opened a restaurant and would like to get a better understanding of how your patrons view it. Creating and distributing a Likert scale survey is a perfect way to find out how they feel about your menu, staff, cleanliness, music, prices, and overall ambience.

Create your survey questions

Once you’ve established your audience and purpose, it’s time to write your survey questions. To do this properly, it’s important that your questions meet several criteria.

They should be well organized

Surveys are most effective when recipients actually complete them, so your Likert scale survey needs to be simple, straightforward, and cohesive. Otherwise, recipients will abandon it in frustration.

Ask a few questions about the same topic consecutively — food, ambience, staff friendliness, and knowledge — and then move onto the next. Grouping similar questions together under a label or subheader is a great way to keep them organized (i.e., keep all questions related to the menu under a “Food and Drink” subheader). Throughout your Likert scale survey, there should be no confusion as to what you’re asking or how one question relates to another.

They should be specific

The most valuable Likert scale surveys deliver honest, accurate feedback, so it’s important to remove all ambiguity. Say, for example, that you’re asking your patrons about service satisfaction. Each question should focus on a different aspect of your restaurant.

Don’t ask, “How satisfied were you with our service?” Instead, ask a question for each type of service, like

• How satisfied were you with our valet?
• How satisfied were you with our servers?
• How satisfied were you with our bathroom attendants?

Asking broad or vague questions can create false and inaccurate data. If one of your survey respondents loved their server but felt the valet service took too long, how would they rate the service? Changing how you word some of your questions or making them more specific can help you home in on what exactly you need to improve in your restaurant.

In this particular example, your survey’s audience would be your restaurant’s patrons, and its purpose would be to understand what’s working and what’s not so you can make improvements.

With Likert scale surveys, you can take the guesswork out of customer satisfaction and get immediate, actionable, nuanced feedback that can help you optimize your business and make more money.

They should be clear, concise, and non-leading

In addition to being well organized and specific, your questions need to be clear and non-leading. They shouldn’t be too lengthy or contain confusing language that can trip up your respondents.

For example, if you ask your patrons, “How satisfied were you with our clean restaurant?” you’re making the assumption that they found it clean. They may answer inaccurately or dishonestly just to move onto the next question.

Pro tip: Including questions instead of statements in your survey also helps reduce potential bias. There may be a big difference between how your respondents would answer questions like “How satisfied were you…” vs statements like “I was satisfied with…”

Decide which point system to use

No matter what type of Likert scale survey you’re creating — customer feedback, employee motivation, or market research survey — you’re probably going to use one of these point systems:

• Three points: This includes a choice of two polar options (one positive and one negative) and one neutral option (e.g., Satisfied, Dissatisfied, and Neither Satisfied nor Dissatisfied).
• Four points: This system gives two positive and two negative options, with no neutral option.
• Five points: This offers two positive and two negative options, plus one neutral option.
• Six points: This includes three positive and three negative options, with no neutral option.
• Seven points: This provides three positive and three negative options, plus one neutral option.
• Nine points: This scale includes four positive and four negative options, plus one neutral option.

These point systems are the most widely used and recognized Likert scales, which can help improve the chances your survey respondents will both understand and complete your survey since they’ll be familiar with its structure.

While you really can’t go wrong with any one of these scales, the five- and seven-point Likert scales are the most popular. Survey respondents need adequate choices, and these two scales give them a nice blend of both positive and negative answers, as well as one neutral option, without overwhelming them.

Additionally, once you’ve decided which point system you’re going to use for your Likert scale survey, it’s a good idea to use it throughout the whole survey, from first to final question. (You can, of course, switch it up from survey to survey.) Changing your scale system within a survey may confuse or frustrate your respondents, leading to inaccurate data.

Build your Likert scale with Jotform

Finally, once you’ve drafted your Likert scale survey blueprint by identifying its purpose and audience, creating questions, and choosing a point system, you’re ready to start building it. Jotform is a perfect tool for creating, customizing, disseminating, and even analyzing your Likert scale survey.

Here’s all you have to do:

1. Create a survey from scratch or use one of Jotform’s 800-plus premade survey templates.
2. Customize it to your heart’s delight, incorporating your brand’s logo, colors, and overall style and then adding your curated, concise questions. Select your Likert rating scale (offering between three and nine options), add your rating scale text (Extremely Satisfied, Somewhat Satisfied, etc.), and even choose how you’d like the rating scale text to align in your survey.
3. Once you’re happy with its look, you can publish your Likert scale survey with the click of a button. Share it with your friends, family, colleagues, or patrons via a link, embed it on your organization’s website, email it, or even download it as a PDF to print and disseminate physical copies.

Jotform is comprehensive, fully customizable, secure, and completely code-free, helping business owners in all industries build surveys that are well designed, professional-looking, and, most importantly, fun and engaging.