What Doing 1000 Surveys Taught Me About User-Centric Design

Here’s my feedback from the other side of the fence

Photo by Kaleidico on Unsplash

Call me obsessed or someone bored, but I’ve done thousands of surveys. From simple text-based surveys to focus groups to online interviews, I’ve done it all.

I mostly do paid surveys, but I will do the occasional unpaid one if someone asks me to.

I even decided to create my own survey tool and worked on it as a startup for a few years before shutting it down. In this process, I interviewed hundreds of user designers and researchers and learned all about the survey process as well.

After leaving my job at Shopify recently, I sat down and began once again on my survey addiction. What I realized was, in a period of almost a decade, I’ve done over a thousand surveys in total on different websites, including:

• Usertesting
• Qmee
• Askable
• Respondent
• and way more.

These surveys range from minutes to sometimes hours.

I realized that I really enjoy giving product feedback, and it’s fun to think about how a user researcher or designer puts together a survey and what they’re trying to gain out of my responses.