10 Tips For Your Next User Experience Survey

Whether you’re building a complex healthcare portal or a finance app for small businesses, you must understand your users’ needs and desires. No matter how great your app is, it will only be successful if it successfully connects with your target audience. 

User experience (UX) surveys are a great way to understand your audience’s user experience and pinpoint the top things they are looking for in your app. While successful UX surveys can provide valuable insights, a poorly designed UX survey can waste precious time and resources. At Grio, we ensure the success of our surveys by following these 10 proven strategies. 

1. Use the First Person

When a user completes your survey, it’s important that they’re answering based on their own experiences, not the secondhand experiences of their friends, family, or other reviewers. Putting your survey in the first person will make users cognizant of answering based on their own experiences. For example, use questions like “My favorite feature is…” rather than “One of the best features is…”.

2. Be Transparent

It’s no secret that users value transparency. You can increase user response rates and user satisfaction by including transparency components, such as:

• Survey Description: Begin your survey with a short description of why the survey is being performed, what data is being collected, and approximately how long it should take. 
• Privacy Policies: Include clear information about your privacy policies, including how data is stored and shared. 
• Gratitude: It may seem silly, but short thank you messages in your request for responses and in your survey personalize your message and help you connect with your audience. 

3. Keep it Simple

Though this tip is about simplicity, it can be one of the most complicated to follow. When checking the simplicity of your survey, make sure you are following these guidelines: 

• Aim for an 8-year-old reading level. Think short words, short sentences, and easily understood questions. 
• Don’t use industry-specific and UX-specific vocabulary. If you need to use specific vocabulary, make sure you are defining acronyms and offering brief explanations for niche terms. 
• Avoid negatives and double negatives, as they can lead to confusion and misunderstandings. For example, the sentence, “Do you disagree that the logo shouldn’t be interactive?” will leave even the most focused respondent confused about how to answer. Instead, update it to, “Do you agree that the logo should be interactive?” This will ensure that users are able to easily and confidently answer your questions. 
• Avoid two-part questions that have only one answer. For example, if you ask, “Is the app easy to use and beautiful?” and provide only a yes or no answer, you require your users to answer both parts of the question similarly. What if they think the app is beautiful but difficult to use or vice versa?
• Don’t give too many potential answers to a question. If you are using a multiple-choice or scaled question, avoid using more than five possible answers.

4. Avoid Bias

Biased questions are surprisingly hard to avoid in UX surveys. However, to achieve the most beneficial results, it’s imperative that the tone of your survey remains neutral. Understanding the biased questions that most commonly plague UX surveys can help you circumvent them:

• Leading, Closed, or Vague Questions: These questions lead your users toward the answer you desire. For example, starting a question with, “Don’t you think that…” leads them toward an answer that agrees with your preconceived ideas. 
• Questions that Make Assumptions: You don’t want to make any assumptions about how users think or feel. A question like, “What do you like most about the app?” assumes that the user likes at least one thing about it and encourages them to provide a positive answer, regardless of their true feelings. 
• Inaccessible Questions or Responses: Accessible surveys ensure that users with disabilities aren’t restricted from participating. Components to increase accessibility in your survey include easy-to-read fonts, alternative text for images, and simple layouts. Most online survey platforms include accessibility scoring to help you create surveys without accessibility bias. 

5. Maintain Privacy

User privacy is paramount in everything you do. Be transparent about your privacy policy and data use, use a secure platform, and put sensitive information toward the end of the survey to minimize the risks for your respondents.

6. Make it Short

We’ve all opened a survey, seen the dozens of questions on the page, and closed the survey without completing it. Keeping your survey short and sweet will help encourage users to complete it. You can streamline your survey by:

• Analyzing the Benefit of Each Question: When creating a survey, it can be tempting to put in every single question that comes to mind. However, this can muddy your survey, convolute your results, and decrease your response rates. For each question you include, ask yourself what you are trying to learn, how you will use that information, and if it is overlapping with any other question you’ve already included. 
• Using Logic Functionality: Logic functionality analyzes a user’s answers and removes subsequent questions that no longer apply. For example, if you ask, “Have you used the online store?” and a user replies, “No,” logic functionality would hide all subsequent questions pertaining to the store. This keeps your survey short and saves your user from tedious “N/A” answers. 
• Providing a Progress Bar: While a progress bar doesn’t impact the length of your survey, it does tell users about how many questions they have left. Users are more likely to complete surveys when they fully understand the time commitment. 

7. Mix Up Question Types

Using multiple question types, such as true/false, multiple choice, scaling, and open-ended questions, allows you to personalize the answer type for each specific question, help users avoid survey fatigue, and get both a macro- and micro-level understanding of your users’ preferences. 

8. Use Prior Research to Influence Your Questions and Answers

You don’t need to reinvent the wheel each time you make a survey. Before drafting your next UX survey, look through the information you’ve already collected for your app, such as established goals and objectives, previous survey results, and results from other research methods, such as interviews and usability testing. For example, if your previous survey found that users loved how you organized your Menu and you haven’t changed it since then, you probably don’t need to re-ask that question. Instead, you can use that knowledge to inform new questions that further support your goals. 

9. Incentivize Your Surveys

Unfortunately, user surveys require multiple responses to provide actionable results. If you don’t receive enough responses, you won’t be able to identify trends in your data at any level of statistical significance. If you find that your response rate is low, providing an incentive can help encourage users to complete your survey. Whether it’s a discount code, a gift card, or being placed in a drawing, even the smallest incentives can have big impacts on response rates. 

10. Test Your Survey Before it Goes Live

Once you’ve drafted your survey questions and put them into your chosen platform, complete a test run of your survey. Make sure all of the questions work as they should, any logic functionality performs correctly, and your results are displayed correctly. Send your survey to colleagues and managers to test as well. Having others review your survey will help you discover bugs, flag biased questions, and fix errors before the survey reaches your users. 

Understand Your Users Today

A user-centric approach is imperative in today’s competitive landscape. No matter which user research method you choose, these tips will help you ensure you are getting unbiased, beneficial user feedback.
Want to learn more about how to turn your user feedback into an unmatched MVP app? Contact us today to find out how we can help you conduct your user research or sign up for a free MVP app consultation.