Avoiding the Double Barrelled Question
Launch library · evergreen read
A double barrelled question asks two things at once, then expects a single answer to cover both of them cleanly. Do you find the service friendly and efficient quietly assumes the two qualities travel together, when in fact a respondent might feel very differently about each one on its own terms.
The result is an answer that cannot really be trusted afterwards. A reply of yes leaves the person asking unsure which half was actually meant, and a reply of no is even less informative, since either quality, or both together, could plausibly be behind it.
Splitting a double barrelled question into two plain ones takes only a moment longer to write, and it removes the guesswork entirely for everyone involved. Anyone editing their own questions can catch most of these simply by checking whether the word and is quietly doing more work than it should.
This same discipline is worth applying to feedback forms and casual check ins alike. A single, clean question almost always produces a cleaner, more usable answer than a compound one ever will, no matter how efficient the combined version seemed when it was first written down.