Survey Confirmation - Emphasize the question or the answer?

Question

I am putting together an online survey, and am designing the confirmation screen that appears just before the respondent submits their answers.

I have limited formatting options, but feel that styling the question different from the answer will make it easier to read.

For an FAQ, I would make the question bold and the answer normal weight, since the user is looking for the question that matches their own question. Since the use for the confirmation is to ensure the user's answers are correct, I wonder if there is any research or opinion as to whether it is better to bold the answer, and not the question.

Example:

How would you rate "x" out of 10?
8

Why did you give that rating?
Because I really like "x" and think it is worthy of that score.

OR

How would you rate "x" out of 10?
8

Why did you give that rating?
Because I really like "x" and think it is worthy of that score.

Or is there another way of doing this that's even better?

Answer 1

Interesting question! Options #1 for both screens.

I think there are a few points here:

• Consistency. You don't want to cause a sudden flip between the two screens and confuse the users or make them question themselves - 'what's changed? what did I do?'
• Key-value pair. Think of the Question being your Key and Answer being your value. Regardless of screen type you'd normally have Key in bold and Value in regular font.
• User memory. This is an opinion and/or experience: people normally remember the questions more and would potentially want a quick reference to their answer by having their eyes drawn to the question they answered. The way to you do it is highlighting the question in bold in your case.
• Q&A and/or FAQ standard. It's a known practice to have questions in bold and answers in regular font regardless of screen type; especially if the answer is long and tricky, user would want to read the answer in a comfortable font, as opposed to CAPS, italics, emojis, coloured text, etc.
• Reading difficulties & annoyances. Similar to the point above: it's easier to read a quick question in bold, than an elaborate answer in bold. Or any other unusual font styles.

Hope this helps a little? :)

Answer 2

Program-supplied data should be "solid", while user-supplied data should be "fluid". If you want to emphasize the user-supplied data, you should use italics, not bold. You can also highlight the difference through fonts; perhaps a more blocky, computerish font for the program-supplied data, while a more natural, handwritten-like font for the user-supplied data. You can also set them off with the formatting: put the user-supplied data in boxes, for instance.