Published by: Elizabeth Akpan
This article was inspired by a survey I took to give user feedback on an experience with a service. Staying awake on a 6-hour flight, bored to the bones and uninterested in watching movies, I decided to play with the feedback form on the airline’s service.
The form was aimed at getting user feedback and under each question, there were 5 options listed for the customer to choose from. Although the questions seemed endless, I found myself answering each one and tapping the screen for the next question. This continued for a good while as filling the survey quickly turned into an exercise that did not require a lot of thinking and eased my boredom.
The short fun exercise was short-lived as I stumbled on a question that made me think, “these options are not compatible with this question.”
The question and options:
Considering your experience on this flight, how likely are you to recommend [INSERT AIRLINE NAME] to others?
- Not at all satisfied
- Dissatisfied
- Neutral
- Satisfied
- Extremely Satisfied
- N/A
From the options listed, I wasn’t sure if choosing “N/A” was the best way to answer this question as the options will work well with a question asking me to rate my experience (a previous question). The options in no way described my likelihood to recommend the service to others. Options on a spectrum of “Very Likely” to “Highly unlikely” seemed more compatible and would generate a more effective response from the user.
For the rest of this article, we’ll be looking at when and how to design surveys for user research.
Why surveys?
Surveys are an effective way to capture quantitative data on a users’ experience with a product or service. It can be used for getting feedback (as is the case in the example highlighted above), evaluating the usability of a system, and testing assumptions(or insights) gathered from guerrilla interviews or focus groups.
Survey checklist
As you design your next survey, we have listed below a few items to check off to make sure your survey is effective.
- Goal: As with virtually everything in design, it is helpful to define what you plan to achieve with the survey and tailor your questions and options towards achieving this goal.
- Flow: Grouping the questions into themes will reduce the cognitive load on the users and make it easier for them to follow the questions. If your survey explores more than one theme, you can have a section in the survey for each of the themes. Also, if there is a central theme, you can move from general questions to specific questions.
- Length: Keeping the survey short, straight-to-the-point and simple will make sure the users are not overwhelmed with questions.
- Clarity: In designing the survey questions, it is important to understand the users you are surveying and ensure the sentences are clear and easy to read.
- Questions focus: This is closely related to the previous point on clarity. Ensuring each question has only one focal point will make it easier for the users to understand the questions and pick a choice from the answers.
- Relevant options: As highlighted in the airline example, the options listed for a question are as important as the question itself. Keeping the options relevant to the question and having a balanced spectrum of options for a user to choose from is important.
- Review: Before sending out the survey, reviewing the questions to ensure they are tailored towards achieving the goal of the survey is important. An additional scan for punctuation and grammatical errors wouldn’t hurt as well.
- Tool: In order to conduct the survey, it is important to research and decide on what tools you will use e.g Google forms, Survey Monkey. Also, it is important to check for the pricing of these tools as well as the limitations (e.g number of responses allowed) to know which is best for your survey.
