  Conversational interfaces are currently on the rise: more and more
applications rely on a chat-like interaction pattern to increase their
acceptability and to improve user experience. Also in the area of questionnaire
design and administration, interaction design is increasingly looked at as an
important ingredient of a digital solution. For those reasons, we designed and
developed a conversational survey tool to administer questionnaires with a
colloquial form through a chat-like Web interface.
  In this paper, we present the evaluation results of our approach, taking into
account both the user point of view - by assessing user acceptance and
preferences in terms of survey compilation experience - and the survey design
perspective - by investigating the effectiveness of a conversational survey in
comparison to a traditional questionnaire. We show that users clearly
appreciate the conversational form and prefer it over a traditional approach
and that, from a data collection point of view, the conversational method shows
the same reliability and a higher response quality with respect to a
traditional questionnaire.
