Ana Villar

Who they are

Villar works on how surveys are designed and answered. The 2013 paper, written with Callegaro and Yang, is deposited in City, University of London's research repository.

This page records only what the papers and their published records state. Biography beyond the cited work is not given here.

Key papers

Where am I? A meta-analysis of experiments on the effects of progress indicators for web surveys (2013), with Callegaro and Yang. The analysis pooled 32 randomised experiments. Progress indicators that moved at a constant rate did not significantly reduce the number of people who abandoned a survey, and increased abandonment where a small incentive had been promised. Indicators that moved fast at first and slowly later reduced abandonment, and indicators that moved slowly at first and fast later increased it.

Key ideas

The central idea is that a progress bar is not neutral. Whether it helps depends on what it tells people about the distance left, and especially on how quickly it appears to move early on. That fits the endowed progress effect, in which an early sense of momentum keeps people working, and it warns against assuming that any progress indicator will help.

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