This MaxDiff survey template uses best-worst scaling to uncover what your customers truly prioritize, across two printable pages that scan straight into scored results.
What this survey measures
Rating scales suffer from a well-known problem: everything ends up "important". MaxDiff (maximum difference scaling) forces a trade-off instead. Respondents see a small set of items and cross the one that matters most and the one that matters least. Repeated over a few blocks, those forced choices produce a much sharper picture of real priorities than a page of agreement scales. This template runs six sets of four over eight online shopping priorities, so every item appears three times, then adds shopping frequency, what people buy online, an age group, and two open questions for anything the list missed.
How to use it on paper
Print the survey on any office printer and hand it out at the counter, in the waiting room, or at your event. Each best-worst set prints as a compact table: items across the top, one row of circles for the item that matters most and one for the item that matters least. When the forms come back, scan the stack and PaperSurvey reads every mark automatically. Each side of every block lands in your dataset as its own column, so a simple count of best picks minus worst picks per item gives you the classic MaxDiff score in any spreadsheet, or export to SPSS, R, or Stata for proper analysis.
Customize this template
Swap the example items for the features, benefits, or messages you want to test. Three to six short items per set keeps the paper table comfortable. The side labels are editable too, and every set here uses the same "Matters most" and "Matters least" wording. Add screening questions up front, or run the same instrument as a web survey alongside the paper version and analyze both together.
Start from this template and have a MaxDiff study in the field today, no specialist conjoint software required.