It’s no secret that UX research is integral to a digital product’s design process. UX research aims to understand and contextualize a product’s target audience, so without it, you can’t have a successful product.
Due to the significance of UX research, it’s unsurprising that UX researchers have developed techniques to acquire valuable data. The technique we’ll examine today is a user survey.
Within our actionable guide, we will uncover the meaning and variations of a user survey. Additionally, we will explore the advantages, processes, and distinctions of a user survey that make it an incredibly useful technique.
What Is a User Survey?
A user experience survey acquires quantitative and qualitative data surrounding a user’s interactions and experiences with a digital product or service.
You can conduct UX surveys in a vast array of ways, including over the phone, via email, or face-to-face.
Additionally, you can use UX surveys at any stage of the design process. However, we recommend that you conduct your survey during the ideation/prototyping stage. You will save time, money, and resources that you would’ve otherwise used to refine your product post-launch.
The Advantages of Using User Surveys
User surveys have a considerable popularity over other methods of data acquisition. Organizing a user survey is an easy and quick process – which is why it’s so popular in the first place!
With practicality at the heart of user surveys, there are a significant amount of advantages to accompany its application.
Below, we have arranged a list of the most impactful benefits of using a UX survey.
1. Reliable Data
You can gather data from users during their actual visit to your site. People are prone to forgetting crucial details about their interactions/experiences.
This means that their feedback may convey inaccuracies regarding their experience if they submit it at a later time.
With UX surveys during their actual visit, these inaccuracies won’t affect your data.
2. Low Costs
Surveys are one of the cheapest ways to acquire user-oriented data, with most costing nothing to organize and conduct.
Even if you financially incentivize your participants, the expenditure will still be minimal in comparison to other similar research methods.
Since the population’s online presence is increasing, most surveys are now online. Some online survey tools charge a fee; however, alternatives like SurveyMonkey serve as an ideal, free survey tool.
3. Simple Organization
It’s worth noting that the simplicity of a survey’s organization relies on your research goals.
However, surveys are ultimately easier to organize than other research methods like user interviews, field studies, and usability testing.
4. Product Refinement
Surveys are great for collecting feedback about a new product, specifically when creating new iterations of said product.
Additionally, by targeting a participant pool that represents your product’s typical user type, you’ll gain valuable insights. These insights will detail your prospective users’ attitudes, beliefs, needs, and, perhaps most importantly, pain points.
By understanding and resolving those pain points, you will simultaneously improve your own product.
5. Objectivity
Surveys are synonymous with accuracy because of their objective nature.
By carefully crafting a survey, you will eliminate personal and confirmation biases that will taint your data.
Surveys actively help to acquire objective results, and, unsurprisingly, objectivity is a vital component of high-quality research data.
6. Scalability
You can conduct surveys via email, over the phone, or face-to-face. Because of this, surveys reach an expansive, diverse range of participants in an efficient manner.
Additionally, survey answers are easily quantifiable, regardless of the size of the participant pool. Thus, all you’ll need to do is analyze the free-form answers to open-ended questions.
7. The Hawthorne Effect
The Hawthorne Effect occurs when participants change their behavior. Studied participants change their behavior because they are aware that you’re observing them.
The Hawthorne Effect produces unreliable data. This is due to participants altering their answers to suit what they assume the researcher wants to hear/see.
By conducting user surveys – especially anonymous ones – participants will answer candidly without the pressure of observation or judgment.
The Most Common Types of User Survey Questions
Recognizing the benefits of user surveys situates their practicality within your research. However, knowing the types of questions to ask is the only way to acquire actionable data.
Below, we’ve explored the different variations of user survey questions so that you can conduct research as effectively as possible.
1. Closed Questions
Closed questions are ideal if you’re acquiring quantitative data. A simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ will answer a closed question. Alternatively, closed questions can have a limited set of answers, whereby the user chooses between options A, B, or C.
Common elements of UI design, like radio buttons and checkboxes, accompany closed questions.
There is an undeniable appeal to closed questions. Closed questions often procure higher response rates as the participants don’t have to type copious amounts of text.
Additionally, closed questions produce statistical analysis, which makes your results easily shareable with your product team and stakeholders.
So, when should you use closed questions?
You should use closed questions in quantitative usability studies where you must evaluate the duration of a participant’s tasks. Closed questions also quantify the amount of errors a participant makes.
Regarding the size of the participant pool, closed-question surveys are perfect for 1000+ participants.
2. Open-Ended Questions
Comparatively, open-ended questions suit the goals of a UX researcher who wishes to obtain qualitative data.
Open-ended questions allow the participants to provide free-form, descriptive answers regarding a specific topic. Derived from these answers, you can determine how a user tackles a problem.
Expectedly, participants can provide answers to open-ended questions via a text box.
From open-ended questions, you can uncover a participant’s mental model, desires, needs, motivation, and problem-solving strategies.
The data from open-ended questions may take longer to analyze. Despite this, open-ended questions allow you to discover more than you may have initially anticipated. Your participants may reveal motivations or behaviors that you didn’t expect to witness.
Just like with closed questions, you must know the best opportunities to ask open-ended questions.
Open-ended questions are ideal for when you’re trying to find out what issues the users have when using digital products. Open-ended questions are also appropriate to utilize when coming up with solutions and target demographics.
Questionnaire vs Survey: What Are the Differences?
You will either randomly select or target your participants. In either instance, you must understand exactly what you’re asking of your participants.
When it comes to the ‘questionnaire vs survey’ coin toss, a UX researcher shouldn’t leave things to chance.
By recognizing the difference between a survey and a questionnaire, you increase your chances of obtaining actionable data.
As you know, surveys are a method of collecting user-focused information. On the other hand, questionnaires are a vital component of that method.
Questionnaires are a part of surveys and serve as the basic set of questions that your participants will answer.
Questionnaires usually focus on producing descriptive results, prompting the participant to provide detailed answers. For this reason, the participant pool of a questionnaire is often smaller than that of a typical survey.
Ultimately, questionnaires implement qualitative data into an otherwise quantitative, statistic-oriented research technique.
By combining quantitative surveys and qualitative questionnaires, your research will become much more effective and applicable to the design process.
How To Create a User Experience Survey
Here’s a step-by-step walkthrough detailing how to create a user experience survey.
1. Clarify the Goals of Your Survey
You must determine what the desired outcome of your survey is. This is so you, your product team, and your stakeholders know what kind of data to expect.
You must also determine how much data and how many participants you will need to accomplish your goals.
2. Define Your Target Audience
Distributing your survey to as many people as possible won’t generate valuable data.
Carefully select your participant pool by deciding whether you want to acquire data from existing/prospective users of your product.
For instance, you can segment your participants into demographics like age, nationality, or gender if it aids your goals.
3. Choose Your Survey Tool
You must then decide which tool you’ll employ to create and distribute your survey.
You should familiarize yourself with your tool’s features before you start designing. Investigate how many questions you can include in each survey and how you can design/format your surveys.
Here are some survey tools you should consider:
Once you’re confident with your survey tool, begin designing your survey in accordance with your research goals.
4. Design Your Survey
Within your survey, you must include the following:
- Your introduction that will provide context for the participants. You should include your goals, your motivations, the survey’s duration, how you’ll use their answers, and address anonymity if applicable.
- Your clear, understandable, and bias-free survey questions.
- Your answer choices should be predefined if you’re asking closed questions.
- Your closing statement that will address the participant’s successful completion of your survey. You should also thank the participants for their time.
5. Test Your Survey
Before you launch your survey, you should have a secondary reviewer check it for logical organization.
The secondary reviewer should also assess the simplicity of the questions and for grammatical errors.
6. Launch Your Survey and Analyze the Data
After checking for technological/clarity errors, you’re ready to launch your survey!
After acquiring all of the data, you must close the survey and analyze the data.
If you’ve asked several open-ended questions, try to identify patterns in the participants’ answers.
User Experience Survey Questions You Should Utilize
To provide you with some inspiration, here are a few examples of effective user experience survey questions.
- What goals are you trying to accomplish with this product?
- How do you think this product will help you?
- What would you change about this product?
- Are there other elements you wish this product would exhibit?
- What was the most difficult point of interaction with this product?
- What problems are you currently facing with similar products?
- How often do you encounter those problems?
- What did you do to try to resolve your problem?
Tips To Optimize Your User Surveys
To further inspire your research, we’ve assembled a list of tips to help you maximize the effectiveness of your surveys.
- Ask neutral questions.
- Make your survey quick to complete.
- Keep your questions simple and straightforward.
- Be transparent about your goals.
- Design for conditionality.
- Respect anonymity.
- Use a balanced rating scale.
- Focus on one topic at a time.
- Provide ‘N/A’ or ‘Other’ options.
- Decide how many responses you need.
UX Research Methods To Use Alongside User Surveys
Although user surveys can provide fruitful results, solely using user surveys won’t produce enough usable data.
What’s more, if your user surveys display any degree of ineffectiveness, it could actually hinder your product’s design process. If you choose an unsuitable set of questions, you risk acquiring inaccurate data that offers little to a UX designer.
Additionally, unless you implement questionnaires into your surveys, you’re only going to acquire quantitative data. Despite the usefulness of quantitative data, it produces little to no insights surrounding the user’s needs, mental models, and desires.
With that being said, you should consider pairing the following UX research methods with your user surveys.
- User interviews
- Usability tests
- Diary studies
- Card sorting
- Field studies
- Focus groups
Prioritizing the User With User Surveys
Knowing your users is the primary goal of UX research.
Hopefully, what you’ve taken away from this article is that knowing your users is vital to your product’s success. By understanding your target audience’s emotions, mindsets, actions, and beliefs, your users’ experiences will be nothing less than consistently exceptional.
To examine the effects of acquiring useful user-focused data in practice, look no further than Page Flows.
We understand the difficulties of discovering user-centric solutions when finding inspiration is a challenge. With Page Flows, you’ll never encounter limitations. With over 4,212 recordings of tried and tested products, your only barrier is your own imagination!
Page Flows has worked alongside over 1,000 happy customers from revered brands via our unparalleled user flow design decisions.
Our extensive customer base stems from our comprehension of our users, utilizing data from unsurpassable research. Using methods like a user survey, our services cater to the needs and desires of all user types.
Get started today to access our growing library of user flow recordings and finally stay up-to-date with current design trends.
