The Role of Surveys in User Experience (UX) Design

Running a business is always challenging, especially when understanding the market and improving user experience. For that, you need to figure out the latest trends and insights from the market and evaluate areas of improvement. On average, a business hears from only 1 in 26 dissatisfied customers as many simply leave, or worse, share their bad experience with others, which can lower engagement and sales. Yet, you need customer feedback and complaints to know their problems and overcome them.

At this point, you have various methods of testing, like online surveys, interviews, polling, A/B testing, etc. Out of these, the most effective way is to create a survey centered around user experience and design. It will help gather valuable data, such as likes and dislikes of users, and make better, more informed decisions.

However, the benefits of surveys for user experience design and development do not just end here. So, we will discuss their complete role in the next section and highlight the importance of conducting user surveys.

How Conducting Surveys Help Build Better User Experiences?

Organizing UX design surveys is a strategic choice that enables both qualitative and quantitative benefits and helps bridge the gap between customers and businesses. Here are some of the most important reasons why you should opt for user experience surveys.

• Understanding and Enhancing Features

UX research surveys are mostly for products or services already running in the market. These surveys provide information on how well the customers are receiving the added features. As a result, the feedback allows you to make necessary adjustments to existing features and add new ones if need be.

For example, if customers are having issues with the functionality, you can enhance it with the next update or version.

• Evaluating Pain Points

To solve a problem, you must first understand what it is. Identifying the pain points of users and understanding them is important to build a user experience. If you are working locally, you can launch small surveys. However, multinational companies need large-scale surveys and UX research data to spot globally occurring pain points. These could be related to any present issues, lack of desired material, insufficient support, or overall less enjoyable experience.

For example, if a customer is complaining about a complex layout or checkout process, you can address it right away to not only fix problems but also make the customer feel valued.

• Addressing Customer Satisfaction

Customer satisfaction is the top priority for every business, and it must be yours, too. Mostly, targeting customers with UX design surveys after a successful purchase or customer service call can show their satisfaction level with your offerings.

Remember, feedback can be both positive, showing what satisfies the customers, as well as negative, highlighting areas that need your attention. You can use surveys to retain customers by asking the right questions and providing solutions to maximize their satisfaction.

• Improving Customer Loyalty

Customer loyalty is crucial for long-term business growth and success. User surveys help calculate customer loyalty and identify loyal, neutral, and unsatisfied customers. You can use this information to devise customer retention strategies.

It is essential to monitor the loyalty score. If it drops down too much, you need to find potential issues and improve the quality of your services to get back on track.

• Help With Journey Mapping

Journey mapping is a visual representation of a customer’s interaction with your business, or specifically, with your products or services. It tracks their entire movement from initial discovery to final checkout and after-sale support. Powerful, balanced, and user-oriented UX surveys can provide valuable information from every step of this process. You can use this to easily identify problems and add new details.

For example, you can integrate user surveys on your online store or website at different stages to measure accessibility, purchase satisfaction, or customer support quality. It provides honest insights into user behavior and much better outcomes as a result.

• During Updates or New Products Launch

If you are planning to rebrand your business, revamp your website or online store, release a major update, or launch a brand new product, a user testing survey is your best friend. It helps predict customer’s thinking, demands, and expectations and enter the market with authority.

Conducting UX design surveys beforehand provides enough time to make necessary adjustments to meet the customer’s requirements and reduce backlash.

• Ongoing Maintenance and Improvements

Changes, updates, and improvements are a constant and ongoing part of every business. Regular and routine maintenance UX surveys help keep track of functionalities, performance, and user satisfaction metrics. They enable continuous adaptation based on usage and feedback.

For example, if you come across a fall in engagement rates related to long load times, you can investigate the problem and make necessary arrangements before it expands. Also, it helps you stay updated with the latest trends and be viable in the competitive market.

How To Create User Research Surveys?

Now that you are completely clear about the benefits and role of surveys in UX design, you must be ready to create and deploy one for your business (if you haven’t already). If you are new to this, here are the simple steps to design stunning user experience surveys.

1. Define Your Survey Objectives

The first step in creating a UX survey is identifying and clearly defining your survey objectives.

What do you want to know from your UX research surveys? What information and insights do you wish to gather?

Perhaps you rebranded and revamped your entire business and you aim to know what people think about this change. Maybe you want to update your products or services and wish to know what improvements, features, and functionalities the customers would want.

After that, figure out the type of survey that is right for you.

The different types of user surveys include:

• User testing surveys
• User interviews surveys
• User experience surveys
• User surveys paid and unpaid
• UX research surveys
• UX intercept surveys
• UX research surveys

Your goals will identify the type of survey and the included questions, or whether you want to gather qualitative data, quantitative data, or both.

2. Choose Your Survey Tool

The next step is to choose a survey tool that will help you create and deploy your UX survey. If you are new in this field, it is better to research different online survey tools such as SurveyCrest, SurveyMonkey, Qualtrics, Responsly, etc. Once you have chosen, get to know the tool before digging in to create a survey.

Make sure to learn about all the features of the tool and what it is capable of. For example, the maximum number of questions allowed per survey, distribution options, and design freedom.

Once you are completely familiar with the tool’s working, start designing your user surveys UX. Here are some excellent UX survey questions and templates to gain inspiration and get a head start.

3. Design Your UX Survey

Now, it is time to design the survey.

A survey consists of 4 parts, which are as follows:

• An introductory paragraph: Its purpose is to welcome the user or participant to the survey. You can start with a short context of the survey, followed by your purpose for conducting it, what is in it for you, what is in it for them, and the approximate time it will take to complete. Also, mention the relevant security and privacy guidelines, including data processing and usage.
• Questions section: The questions start immediately after the introduction section. You must ensure the questions are clear, to the point, and easy to understand. Find more details on how to effectively write survey questions in the best practices section of this article.
• Answer choices with each question: Write all possible choices for users to choose from in case of closed questions. For open-ended questions, provide enough space so users can answer comfortably, but avoid asking questions that require long answers.
• A closing message: At the end of the user surveys, include a short message to inform the participants about their successful survey completion and thank them for taking the time to do so. Mostly, surveys show a thank you message after the user hits ‘Submit’.

4. Perform Thorough Testing

Before sending off your surveys to the customers, ask someone else to review them first (multiple people, if possible). Doing so will help verify that the survey is grammatically correct or typos-free and ensure that every question and answer is clear, understandable, and sensible.

If need be or until you are satisfied with it, check the whole document another time (or multiple times over, as you wish) before finally deciding to deploy it.

5. Select Participants and Hit Send

At last, your UX design surveys are ready to engage the users and generate responses.

For the choice of participants, it depends on the nature of your survey. If you wish to target only existing customers, you can attach it to the products or services. Also, you can send the survey via email.

On the other hand, if you want to connect with a bigger audience, you must conduct large-scale surveys and UX research. However, it is best to collaborate with an agency to make sure everything goes smoothly. Additionally, several user research and survey tools have participant databases that you can access to maximize customer feedback in surveys.

Now, it is time to start sending out surveys and awaiting responses.

Best Practices For Creating Successful UX Design Surveys

Designing UX surveys for users is not rocket science, but neither is it a piece of cake. Creating surveys requires meticulous planning and careful execution, along with a set of expertly picked questions and answers.

Confused? Don’t be!

We said we are here to help you craft market-winning surveys and we aim to do so. Here is a curated list of best practices for creating top-notch user experience surveys that yield actionable insights.

1. Make it Short, Simple, and Relevant

People value time, especially in today’s age. If a survey consists of more than 25-30 questions, spans multiple pages, and has a complexity level of a story arc, it will most likely discourage or scare off the users. So, ensure your survey is short and sweet, as it will encourage the participants to stick to the end.

Moreover, the relevancy of the questions is also a crucial factor to consider. If the questions are too lengthy or deviate off-topic, the users will most likely get irritated and leave. Therefore, only include relevant questions in the survey sheet, as it will give the most valuable data according to the goal of your survey.

Some ways to ensure content relevancy are:

• Devise a path according to your target audience and goals, and never sway away from it.
• Add not applicable/don’t know/rather not answer as an extra answer choice for all closed questions.

2. Avoid Favoritism

Favoritism or biases of any kind can create uneasiness and alter the results of the survey. Ensure that you avoid all forms of sampling bias, interviewer bias, and response bias when designing a survey to collect data.Some common forms of biases include:

• Question order bias: Respondents react differently based on the sequence of questions.
• Confirmation bias: Modifying questions to fit your personal beliefs.
• Primacy bias: Participant selecting the first option present.
• Recency bias: People are influenced by their most recent experience.
• Hindsight bias: Respondents that overestimate their prediction ability.
• Assumption bias: Assuming participants know certain information.
• Clustering bias: People see things and perceive patterns or clusters when there are none.

Here are some ways to avoid it from your end and ensure fair answers from respondents:

• Do not include leading questions that prompt the wanted answer.
• Use neutral tone and language throughout the survey.
• Ask an expert to review and provide feedback on the survey, especially checking bias.
• Test the survey yourself on a small group of people before deploying, preferably your friends, family members, and colleagues first, then random people.

3. Mix and Match Questions

Although multiple-choice questions are excellent for information gathering, open questions enable more qualitative results. You can use both of them to give users more freedom to answer certain questions and get a more detailed view of their thinking, beliefs, and sentiments.

If you want to get the most out of mixed questions, use them according to the information you seek. Open questions provide detailed information quickly, while closed questions provide relevant answers to specific questions and are perfect for measuring user satisfaction and preferences.

4. Ensure Wide Accessibility

The more accessible your survey is, the more audience it will capture and thus provide varying perspectives. You can use this to gain diverse insights from a wide range of audiences, including those with diminished abilities. Ultimately, it will help gather more and better quality data, which will improve decision-making.

To ensure wider reach of your UX research surveys, use easily readable fonts, suitable color contrast, alt text for images, and support for navigation through the keyboard. Moreover, avoid complex or stuffed layouts and matrix-style formats. These features and functionalities will allow most people to participate in your survey. It will not only bring in more answers but also improve customer’s trust in your brand.

5. Ensure Maximum Privacy

Ensuring industry-standard privacy and security is critical for customers as well as your business. Moreover, if your security parameters are trustworthy, they will gain people’s confidence and make them feel safe in sharing data with your brand. As a result, people will engage with your surveys without any fear of safety or privacy.

To enable this level of trust, you must put your privacy policy at the start of your UX design surveys and conduct them over a secure platform. Moreover, ask personal and sensitive questions near the end of the surveys. Finally, maintain high-quality standards to assure the confidentiality of users’ survey responses.

Final Takeaway

And that is it. Our article regarding the role of surveys in user experience design comes to an end. We discussed its diverse benefits and provided a step-by-step guide and best practices for creating successful UX design surveys.

No matter the size of your business, our detailed guide is for everyone. The two most important takeaways in this article are:

• Clearly define survey goals to avoid getting lost along the way.
• Ask the right questions, but ensure they are engaging and unique.

If you want to improve the overall user experience of your brand, products, and services, ask the users themselves. Create a marketing survey, follow our guidelines, and gain valuable insights quickly and easily. Once you reach this point, half of the work is already finished and you just have to understand the responses, make necessary adjustments, fix issues, address users’ concerns, and improve your products or services. Ultimately, it will boost your brand’s growth and enable success in all aspects.