How to Create An Effective User Survey with Examples
Every product manager knows that user feedback is the cornerstone by which you can measure the actual benefit and success of your product or service in your chosen market.
Every product manager knows that user feedback is the cornerstone by which you can measure the actual benefit and success of your product or service in your chosen market.
Every product manager knows that user feedback is the cornerstone by which you can measure the actual benefit and success of your product or service in your chosen market.
User surveys are a great tool to gather user feedback because they:
Done correctly, a user survey gives you the opportunity to improve customer experience, retention, and lifetime value. At UserVitals, we'll explore what goes into an effective user survey, with specific examples of what works best to get actionable product feedback.
Decide exactly what information you want to get from your survey. Creating a survey without a clear problem you're trying to solve will result in a cluttered structure and frustration for survey takers.
It's important that your survey provides actionable insights. Put the hypotheses you want to test at the center of the survey and make sure every question asked serves the purpose of proving or disproving that hypothesis.
When you see this survey below from Blue Bottle Coffee, it tells the user that they are taking it to get their coffee recommendations. Each answer to each question is a possible solution to the problem of "Which coffee best suits the customer's taste?"
The questions asked and thus answers given correspond to specific products from the range of Blue Bottle Coffee.
Limit the number of solutions you suggest to your users to solve their problem.
Keep the focus of the survey short and sweet. Any additional action or question you include in your survey will cause users to drop out. Research from SurveyMonkey shows that surveys longer than 7-8 minutes drop completion rates by 5% to 20%. Only ask the questions that are necessary to get the data you need.
Once you know what problem you're targeting with your survey, you can decide what kind of data will help you answer it.
Quantitative data tends to be more concrete and precise, while qualitative responses are more detailed and descriptive, and provides rich, individualized customer insights. When you combine the two, you can contextualize your feedback.
Quantitative user surveys are:
You can gather quantitative feedback from surveys like the simple Thumbs Up/Thumbs Down surveys or customer satisfaction surveys like this NPS from Customer.io, an email automation tool.
The limited responses provide quick insight into how users feel about specific aspects of your product, rather than their overall experience.
Quantitative surveys can be very easily inserted into your mobile or web app, in an email, like this customer feedback survey from Hubspot embedded into your website. Include follow-up questions after the user has done an action to get fresh feedback about their experience.
Qualitative user surveys through customer interviews or feedback boxes:
Because they have a longer format than a yes/no checkbox, qualitative surveys aren't easily inserted into mobile apps or an email signature and should be embedded as links. They also work effectively on websites or web apps.
Choose the type of questions, taking into account the problem you want the user survey to answer, the type of feedback you need, and the time and tools you have to analyze the feedback.
There are a few reasons why choosing a good customer feedback tool will help you distribute and increase the response rate for your survey. Not only that, an automated customer feedback tool like UserVitals will help you:
Effective customer feedback tools help companies better understand their target customers and identify opportunities. Check out our comprehensive guide to customer feedback tools here.
Asking the right questions in the right way, makes your users more willing to complete your survey.
There are a few things to keep in mind when phrasing your questions to encourage responses:
Asking the right questions in the right way makes your users more willing to complete your survey.
Open-ended questions allow respondents to answer in their own words, while closed-ended questions have a limited number of possible answers (e.g., yes or no):
Open-ended questions:
Close-ended questions:
Surveys should offer accurate and unbiased insights into the problem you are trying to solve. Questions should not be constructed to be overly biased and should instead lead to honest and objective feedback.
When creating an unbiased user survey, keep five key things in mind:
How was your user experience?
User surveys can be distributed in many ways to increase response rates. Here are some ideas to get you started:
Accurate, constructive, and unbiased feedback from your user surveys is key to gathering actionable insights to improve your product or service.
It is beneficial to use a variety of survey types and questions that give you a full picture of your user experience. A tool like UserVitals will collect, organize and filter all these insights so that you don't lose any of this valuable feedback.
Keep your goal in mind and make sure you choose targeted questions to deliver through the right channels with a simple and streamlined survey to maximize response rates.
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