Table of contents
1. What are a UX surveys and how do they benefit your business?
2. Six strategies for UX surveys
3. Four types of UX survey questions
4. How to create, distribute, manage, and analyse UX surveys
5. Top five survey tools for conducting UX surveys
1. What are UX surveys and how do they benefit your business?
A UX (user experience) survey is a questionnaire that comprises questions that enable you to collect quantitative and qualitative aspects of the users’ interaction with the customer service or website. Responses to UX surveys help you to understand the SWOTs (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) associated with your product, service, or website. This will allow you to work on the weaker areas of your product and improve it to take advantage of various lucrative opportunities.
There are other small benefits of capturing user feedback through UX surveys. They allow you to find out why visitors visit your website, i.e., what they are looking for. This will help you to see your product through the eyes of your customers and to improve product experience.
2. Six strategies for UX surveys
Let’s explore the top six strategies to create actionable UX surveys that address specific pain points and prioritise product changes.
2.1 Identify your survey’s goals
Always keep your survey’s goals in mind before creating it, as it will help you to focus on several important things such as:
- The motive behind creating the survey
- Your target audience
- The channels you will use to send the survey to the target audience you are asking to respond to it
Clearly defined survey goals will help you to quickly frame your survey and choose its questions. They will also allow you to create a survey for the specific audience you are targeting.
2.2 Your survey should not reflect your opinion
When designing your UX survey or choosing your survey’s questions, make sure that your survey doesn’t reflect your personal opinion. Avoid asking leading and biased questions, including framing effects in your questions such as “what do you like most about our product?”. You can’t ask this question unless you are unsure about their experience. You can avoid this from happening by using survey logic and branching.
2.3 Choose the scale of the survey’s questions carefully
An unbalanced survey causes your customers to give you an inaccurate rating or sway answers as they don’t have much choice. Always use a balance scale to get accurate data. For example, you are asking the question: “Did you enjoy the overall experience with us? Please rate it on a scale of 1-5.” When you add “1 = enjoyed it a little”, and “5 = enjoyed it a lot,” your scale is unbalanced because it is based on your personal opinion or the assumption that your customers have enjoyed the experience. But maybe your customers don’t agree with this and wish to strongly disagree with this specific question. Thus, you should make your survey unbiased and genuine.
2.4 Keep your survey short, simple, and quick
It is intrinsic to human psychology that people are reluctant to dedicate time to long content, including surveys. Keep your surveys short and simple so that customers can respond quickly. Think about the touch points or places where you can keep your survey short and pose a question that is immediately clear to your audience and can be answered without much effort. For example, you can trigger a UX survey question in the form of a pop-up or survey button on your website’s home page.
2.5 Keep control of the frequency your survey is triggered
On-site surveys distract users or visitors from their experience. If you trigger surveys multiple times or send multiple invitations, you can irritate your audience, and they may abandon your survey or even your site. You can automate your survey schedule or plan it manually with some advanced settings that control your survey’s frequency like survey throttling. This setting automatically identifies the same customer through their contact number and email address and thus avoids over-triggering.
2.6 Ask follow-up questions
UX surveys provide both quantitative and qualitative aspects of the experience with the product. You can ask a close-ended question including NPS (Net Promoter Score) to know the quantitative ratings. For example, “On a scale of 0-10, how likely are you to recommend our product to a friend or colleague?” A standard NPS question provides you quantitative feedback (only scoring or rating). If you want to know the reason for the score, you should ask follow-up questions or open-ended questions such as “Why did you give this rating?”.
3. Four types of UX survey questions
To have success with a response-driven UX survey, you need to ask the relevant questions. It is advisable to avoid leading questions and ask supported question types.
3.1 Multiple Choice Questions
Multiple Choice Questions (MCQ) are a question type in which a respondent is provided with different fixed options to answer the survey. Either the respondent chooses one response (single-select multiple-choice question) or many (multi-select multiple-choice question), but all of them from a given list of options. If you are using single-select questions, then radio buttons are an ideal option, and if you are using multi-select questions, you should go with checkboxes.
3.2 Star Rating Questions
In this question type, respondents are provided with a set of stars to rate their experience or feedback. The higher the number of stars is, the higher the agreement with the statement. The rating form of the question is not restricted to marking stars only: users can also embed smileys or heart icons into their answer. For example, if a restaurant wants to collect feedback about their food, services, and ambiance, they can use a star rating question.
3.3 Net Promoter Score (NPS) Questions
The Net Promoter Score (NPS) measures customer perception and customer loyalty towards a business based on one simple question: “How likely is it that you would recommend [Organisation/Product/Service] to a friend or colleague?”. NPS Questions help you to determine the loyalty of your customers. The result ranges from -100 to 100 and measures the willingness of customers to recommend a company, its products, or services. The Net Promoter Score survey is ideally a two-part questionnaire. The first part is the Net Promoter Score Question, and the second part is the reasoning behind the score.
3.4 Follow-up or open-ended questions
A follow-up question is when you ask the reason for the score or rating. But other open-ended questions can help you to understand your product through your customers’ eyes.
There are various product-based UX survey questions that you can consider adding to your surveys:
- How did you learn about our product or website?
- How likely is it that you would recommend our product or website to a friend or colleague?
- What do you like most about your experience with our product or website?
- What do you like least about your experience with our product or website?
- How easy is our product or website to use?
- How can we improve our product or website?
4. How to create, distribute, manage, and analyse UX surveys
To create, distribute, manage, and analyse UX surveys, you need a comprehensive online survey tool packed with various features and high-end automation. A professional survey software provides functions such as:
- Survey builder – Although every survey software has pre-built survey templates, you can easily customise feedback forms and create white-label surveys with an in-built survey builder. It will allow you to customise the type of your survey questions, create the survey, insert your logo, change the background colour, etc. In addition, you will also be able to create surveys in more than one language.
- Multi-channel feedback collection – The survey tool allows you to share your survey question on your website either as a web-embedded survey or as popups or buttons.
- Survey response alerts and notifications – You can easily keep a real-time track of the incoming survey responses. The survey software allows you to set up instant email and SMS alerts for feedback. It helps you quickly identify customer issues and solve their queries to improve their experience.
- Survey reporting and analytics – An ideal survey tool provides additional reporting and analytics modules to access your survey reports.
- Third-party integrations – The survey tool allows you to integrate your survey system with other CRMs and third-party apps to easily automate the workflow of your surveys.
5. Top five survey tools for conducting UX surveys
The customer experience market is brimming with various comprehensive survey tools, but which one is the best for your business? To answer this question, we share below the list of the top five survey tools that are best for conducting UX surveys.
5.1 Zonka Feedback
Zonka Feedback is a comprehensive survey tool that allows you to create, capture, manage and analyse product or website feedback. It comprises various features such as a survey builder to create white-label surveys. Zonka Feedback smartly captures product or website feedback in two ways: embedded surveys and widget surveys (pop-ups and buttons). This tool also provides a collaborative response inbox that allows you to monitor all responses in real-time. It breaks down complex data into user-friendly analytical reports (trends, drill down, insights reports). Zonka Feedback offers out-of-the-box APIs and third-party integrations that automate survey workflows.
Price: starting at $24 per month
Ratings (G2 score): 4.7/5
Free trial: 15 days
5.2 SurveyMonkey
SurveyMonkey allows you to create surveys, polls, quizzes, and capture customer feedback via chat, weblink, and more. There is a free version of SurveyMonkey that provides free survey templates with up to 10 questions, but there is also a paid version with free trial without these restrictions. It also provides an extensive array of survey question types, including rating, emoticons, MCQs, and Likert Scale. SurveyMonkey’s snap analysis provides information in the form of cheats and summaries.
Price: basic package for free, paid packages priced differently based on your geographic location
Ratings (G2 score): 4.4/5
Free trial: 30 days
5.3 QuestionPro
QuestionPro works as a UX survey platform that provides more than 250 survey templates and 30+ question types to create effective product UX surveys. It also offers more than 95 languages that allow you to capture feedback from audiences across the globe. The analytics and reporting capabilities of QuestionPro help you turn your complex data into actionable insights. This software is known for its ultimate data security through GDPR and ISO compliance. There is a free “essentials” package with limited features.
Price: Essentials package for free, paid packages starting at $129 per month
Ratings (G2 score): 4.4/5
Free trial: 10 days
5.4 Zoho Survey
Zoho Survey is a survey tool packed with unlimited features like extensive survey themes, 25+ survey question types, more than 30 survey languages. There are different packages starting from free with limited features. The paid versions of Zoho Survey are packed with additional features like white-labelling, skip logic and branching, etc. that customise the look and feel of your surveys. Zoho Survey also provides a smart analytics platform that allows you to analyse the sentiment of the responses you receive.
Price: basic package for free, paid packages priced differently based on your geographic location
Ratings (G2 score): 4.4/5
Free trial: 7 days
5.5 ProProfs Survey Maker
ProProfs Survey Maker effortlessly creates stunning website surveys. It provides you with thousands of user-friendly product feedback templates and a white-label survey feature to customise the look and feel of your survey. ProProfs Survey Maker allows you to share your feedback form on your website and social media sites in the form of pop-ups and buttons.
Price: up to 10 responses for free, Essentials package starting at $5 per month for 100 answers per month
Ratings (G2 score): 4.2/5
Free trial: 15 days
We’ve only scratched the ground with the information in this guide: there is much more to be learned. But by thoughtfully applying this guide, you will be able to create great surveys for your users to understand and solve their issues… and yours.
