Everyone talks about user experience, but how do you know exactly what your users want unless you ask them?
In this blog, Justin Kevalaitis, a Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) Specialist, will explore the different types of UX surveys and provide practical guidance on how to decide which type is right for your business.
What You’ll Learn
- What is a User Survey?
- Should Your Business Use User Surveys?
- 5 Types of User Surveys
- Create Your Own User Surveys in 8 Steps
- User Survey Best Practices
What is a User Survey?
User surveys, or UX surveys, are a form of market research that brands and businesses use to improve their products or services. Usually written as questionnaires, they go directly to the source — your consumers — to ask detailed questions about the product or service your business provides.
By asking the consumer directly, businesses gain unique and valuable insights into how to improve their users’ experience. Questions can also be asked to improve a business’s digital marketing strategy, which improves user loyalty to a particular brand.
Since all UX survey questions are asked in the same way, the results capture the participants’ unbiased opinions on the experience.
My Expert Insights on UX Surveys
UX surveys are one of the best tools businesses have for CRO. It’s not just about asking questions; it’s about connecting with your audience and giving them the content they want.
You might be surprised at how your conversion will grow when you tailor your content to what your users actually want, compared to what you think they want.
Action Item: Take a look at your current content marketing strategy and pinpoint areas that need to be improved. Then, using this blog as a guide, develop your own UX research survey to help you fill in the blanks and find better ways to connect with your audience.
Should Your Business Use User Surveys?
In short, yes.
User surveys are key to understanding exactly what your customers are looking for. They provide rich insights and qualitative data you can’t find anywhere else.
Using these insights and data, you can make decisions about how to market your product or service to improve the user’s benefit and the business’s bottom line. Knowing what your audience resonates with the most will help you put together more effective and successful campaigns.
A business can only make so many decisions based on what it thinks its customers want, but UX surveys provide the information directly from the consumers themselves.
5 Types of UX Surveys
In general, there are five different types of UX research surveys. Each one serves a different purpose and each one has its pros and cons. Some of these types can be combined into one survey, depending on your desired outcome.
1. Customer Effort Score
This type of UX survey measures how easy (or hard!) it is for your consumers to engage with your business. Typically, they measure how satisfied customers are with the ease of contacting customer service, using a widget on your website, or upgrading their content.
A Likert Scale is a five to seven-point scale that aligns with statements like “strongly disagree” and “strongly agree.”
2. Customer Satisfaction Surveys
Customer satisfaction surveys are probably the most popular type of UX research survey. These ask how satisfied your customers are with your product or service.
3. Net Promoter Score Surveys
Wondering how loyal your customers are? A Net Promoter Score, or NPS, survey is just what you need to get that insight! They will also help pinpoint potential issues so you can solve them before little issues become big ones.
4. Close-Ended Questions for Quantitative Research
Who doesn’t love a good chunk of data? When you include close-ended questions in your UX surveys, you’ll be able to analyze sets of numbers rather than read through large paragraphs and sporadic thoughts.
Since these surveys are fairly easy to answer and provide responses to pick from, customers are also more likely to respond and provide answers that you can actually use.
5. Open-Ended Questions for Qualitative Research
Open-ended questions give your survey takers more wiggle room to express their opinions. They are often used as a follow-up question to other close-ended questions.
While they can give you more insight into what your customers are thinking and feeling, they can be a little trickier to get responses to since they take more effort than selecting a provided number or answer.
Create Your Own User Survey in 8 Steps
Now that you know the types of UX survey questions to ask, let’s discuss how to create one that will give you the insight you need.
1. Define Your Goal
The first step toward creating a UX survey is to define your goal. What do you want to get out of this exercise?
If you want to know more about your business’s pain points, you should ask questions such as “what problems have you encountered when using our site/product/service?” or “What improvements would you make to our site/product/service?”
However, if you want to better understand your customers’ loyalty to your brand, you wouldn’t ask the same questions. Questions such as “How well do our products/services/site meet your needs?” or “Have you ever considered switching to a competitor? Why or why not?” would help get you the information you need.
2. Identify Your Target Audience
The next step is to identify your target audience. If you want to know how young professionals view your services, you shouldn’t ask users 60 years of age and older.
Identifying your target audience will help you narrow down who you’re collecting data from and ensure that you’re getting the information that you’re looking for.
3. Craft Questions
Once you’ve identified your goal and audience, it’s time to craft your questions. Remember, these questions should be relevant to both your goal and your audience.
Questions to Uncover Customer Pain Points
- What do you primarily use our product/service/site for?
- What problems have you encountered using our product/service/site?
- Does our product/service/site improve your daily life?
- How often do you use our product/service/site?
- Do you find certain aspects of our product/service/site frustrating? If so, which ones?
- Has our product/service/site helped you get closer to your business/personal goals?
- Do you think our product/service/site is appropriately priced?
- Would you recommend our product/service/site to your family or friends?
- How long have you been using our product/service/site?
Test the Loyalty of Your Customer
- How likely are you to recommend our product/service/site to your friends?
- How often do you use our product/service/site?
- Have you ever considered using a competitor’s product/service/site?
- Have you ever used a competitor’s product/service/site in the past?
- How long have you been using our product/service/site?
- On a scale of 1-10, how would you rate the value you get for your money?
- Do you feel valued as a customer of our business?
- What are some ways that you could feel more valued as a customer of our business?
- How could we improve your experience?
- How satisfied are you with our product/service/site?
- How often do you engage with our content?
- What are your favorite aspects of our product/service/site?
- How important is our product/service/site to your daily routine?
At this point, brainstorm as many questions as you can. You can always cut down your list later to direct your responses to provide the information that you need.
4. Select a UX Survey Tool
The great thing about UX surveys is that you don’t need to create them from scratch every single time. There are plenty of great UX survey tools out there to help you solicit, gather, and analyze your data.
Google Forms
One of the easiest to use is Google Forms. The best part about Google Forms? It’s free!
It’s customizable to a point but fairly low-ticket. It’s not flashy by any means, but it will deliver your data in various ways, including charts and graphs. It will also export the data into a Google Sheet for easy reference.
Hotjar
Another popular UX research tool is Hotjar. With this tool, you can collect qualitative data and quantitative data, install heat maps on your site, and conduct research through popups.
SurveyMonkey
SurveyMonkey is another popular UX survey tool. SurveyMonkey has the tools you need to succeed if you want to survey your employees, customers, target markets, or more.
One major highlight of this tool is that you can choose from expertly written templates based on the type of survey you want to use and your target audience. No starting from scratch here!
SurveyMonkey UX Tool
Typeform
Used by popular sites such as Airbnb, Mailchimp, Hermes, and Hubspot, Typeform makes collecting UX surveys even easier. It also integrates with over 120 workflow apps to make it easy for you to incorporate the data into your existing platforms.
Jotform
Jotform is another popular UX survey tool. With a library of over 10,000+ form templates and 1,300 PDF templates, you’re sure to find one that fits your needs.
5. Pilot Survey
Once your survey is designed, it’s time to test it out! Send it out to a small group to test out all the kinks. This is the perfect time to make sure your UX survey questions make sense, your survey is easy to navigate, and all your links work.
During this phase, you can also run A/B testing on your UX surveys to see if a certain phrase or type of survey resonates more with your preferred audience.
6. Launch Survey
Send your UX survey out to selected consumers, potential audiences, and others who you want insight from.
Remember to send it to the correct audience so your data is accurate. For example, don’t send a customer satisfaction survey to a group of potential customers who haven’t purchased anything yet.
7. Analyze & Interpret Results
Once your survey has run for the selected timeframe, it’s time to analyze and interpret your results.
Take a serious look at what your participants are telling you about your business and decide how you’ll turn these responses into changes within your company. You might be surprised at how much your conversion rate increases when you start giving your audience exactly what they want to see!
8. Share Insights & Implement
Once your analysis is complete, it’s time to share your findings! You can share them internally or externally. The decision is yours.
Sharing them will help show that you take customer satisfaction seriously and also provide an explanation as to why you’ll be changing certain things in your business.
User Survey Best Practices
Like anything else in business, you don’t need to reinvent the wheel. Here are some of the best practices for UX surveys that will get you the best results possible.
- Keep it short and sweet. Anything too long will cost you participants.
- Use neutral language. Anything else could sway the responses and give you inaccurate information.
- Mix up your questions to yield different responses.
- Be clear in your line of questioning. If your participants don’t understand what they’re being asked, you won’t get accurate responses.
- Add in a few open-ended questions to give your participants the opportunity to expand on their responses if they want to.
- Allow participants to skip questions if they don’t want to answer them.
- Be as specific as possible.
Basically, create these surveys for your audience. Make them as easy as possible for your participants to navigate. If it’s too confusing or complicated, you’ll lose them—along with the valuable insights they could provide!
Run a UX Survey With Ignite Visibility
Ignite Visibility has been providing high-quality digital marketing to local and national brands for years. Whether you want to improve your offerings or launch a new product, we know how to find out what your audience is looking for!
Are you ready to craft a UX research survey that will get you the insight you need to take your brand to the next level? Our calendars are open and we’re ready to help!
Schedule a consultation meeting with our team of digital marketing experts today!
