Better User Research Through Surveys

Key Takeaways

[Music] hi I'm Chris Gray and today I'll be talking about how to create a great online survey if you're anything like me you'll notice that online surveys are often executed poorly however if done properly they can be a fantastic way to gather data you should approach your survey with a clear understanding of what it is you actually need from the survey are you running it to understand your end users inform the direction of a design or assess a live website nting out these objectives will influence the type of survey and the collection method you should use getting your questions right is important if you ask poor questions you'll get poor responses that can't be relied upon here are some tips make sure you group similar questions together and order them logically they also need to be easy to understand and appropriate for the audience sounds obvious but if your questions are ambiguous you risk having them answered incorrectly avoid double negatives for example a question like is your manager non-responsive could be rewarded to be less confusing avoid questions that contain two concepts for example asking about someone's leadership and communication skills in the one question could make it difficult to answer for your audience you balanced rating scales with an equal number of positive and negative options this will increase the chance that the results reflect the participants true beliefs use open-ended questions it can be great to use multiple choice questions together proportions of feedback and priority and then ask the more probing why include don't know options it's more helpful to know that your audience doesn't hold an opinion on a topic rather than force them into an answer doing so can distort the picture by overestimating the positive or negative finally once your survey design is complete consider launching it to a subset of your audience before sending it to the whole sample there are many online tools available for running surveys for all but the most basic of surveys you should expect to pay something for the tool the key to a successful survey is keeping it simplea in the objectives and information required from the study up front and then making sure the questions asked cover them keep your participants in mind when writing your questions and good luck