In-app Survey Questions: Best Practices, Types & Examples

In-app Survey Questions: Best Practices, Types & Examples

In-app survey questions can be one of the most effective tools when running product research.

By collecting feedback directly from your customer base (or in mobile apps) about what their experience with your product has been like, what users dislike about your product, and what their struggles are, you can fix them and build amazing products and improve customer experience.

But crafting surveys is a bit of a work of art. You need to consider everything from the user’s journey to the context of the question being asked.

We’ve put together a quick guide for you, including best practices, types of surveys, and examples of survey questions you must ask your users!

TL;DR

  • In-app surveys help you with continuous product discovery and help you create better product experiences.

  • With the right app survey questions, you can get targeted user feedback, higher response rates, and gain actionable insights.

  • Before writing in-app survey questions, outline the purpose of your survey, effectively word your questions and choose the type of feedback you want to collect. Afterward, segment the users you want to send the survey to and test with your questions.

  • Good in-app survey questions include market research and user persona survey questions, user satisfaction, and experience questions, customer service experience questions, etc.

  • To create app surveys, you need a tool. Whether you go for an NPS survey to measure user satisfaction or just want to bounce ideas from your customer base over to the development team, you can do everything with Userpilot without writing a line of code.

  • The only disadvantage Userpilot has is that it doesn’t support mobile app surveys.

    Create in-app surveys with Userpilot!

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What are in-app surveys?

User feedback can be collected via in-app surveys, which are an excellent way to connect with your customers.

Using surveys, you can gather valuable customer feedback on the product’s UX, features, functionality, and onboarding. You can learn how your customers feel about your app as a whole or how users interact with its individual features.

You can collect app surveys with mobile app surveys or web in-app surveys.

Why are app survey questions important?

I’m sure you’re asking yourself, why can’t I just send a survey via email?

Here’s the thing – sending a survey may get you some results, but you’re not targeting your users where they’re at while their mind is fresh with their most recent experience.

Collecting feedback in-app can bring you and your team a wealth of knowledge and insights from your customer base. The benefits of in-app feedback collection include:

  • Targeted user feedback – You can segment your customer base and collect feedback from a specific user segment (new customers, beta testers, loyal app users, etc.)

  • Higher response rates – Customers are more likely to respond to your questions in-app, where they are. It’s easier to collect mobile app feedback rather than take time from their day to reply to your email questionnaire.

  • Gain actionable insights – In-app surveys help you gather insights on the spot and use those insights to create better experiences and features.

  • Faster feedback loop – It’s easier to close the feedback loop because everything takes place in one platform.

The key part here is that asking the right questions at the right time will enable your team to understand where potential problems and friction points are. Knowing what, how, and when to ask in your surveys is crucial.

Who can benefit from in-app surveys?

And what’s more, these in-app survey questions aren’t just for the benefit of product teams. Here is how your other teams can benefit from them:

  • Product teams and product managers can optimize personas and user journeys for a more personalized experience.

  • Success teams can get to know their customers and set them up for growth, improving the in-app experience.

  • Marketing has better insight into how to craft conversations with target audiences, verticals, and industries.

  • Sales teams can qualify leads better before they purchase, and make sure there’s a proper product-customer fit.

How to write in-app survey questions?

Before writing your in-app survey questions, you need to have a clear understanding of what you want to achieve with your surveys. Hers is the whole process behind in-app surveys.

Define the goal of your survey

It’s important to outline the purpose of the in-app survey. If you can identify the problem you’re trying to solve, it’ll help frame how your questions are written out. So before starting, ask yourself these questions:

  • What is the goal of the in-app survey?

  • What are you trying to learn, and what will you do with what you learn?

  • What is the outcome you’re hoping to get from this exercise?

Make sure your goals follow a goal-setting framework like the one below.

SMART goal-setting framework

SMART goal-setting framework.

Effectively word your questions

How you word your questions is incredibly important. The key thing here is to watch out for inadvertent favoritism.

Don’t insert your own bias by setting it up in a way where you expect a positive or negative answer (ie, “Were you frustrated using this?” implies you expect frustration. Instead ask, “Did you accomplish your goal?”)

In-app survey

In-app survey created with Userpilot.

When writing questions and their respective instructions, it’s also important to keep sentences short and concise. People already have the knack of skim reading, so the longer or more complicated the question, the less value you’ll get out of it.

Choose the type of feedback you want to collect

If you want to collect qualitative feedback, you can use open-ended questions. Open-ended questions are those that focus on allowing the user to describe something in their own words.

The benefit of this is you get more insights into what the experience is like, and may even discover other possibilities for potential problems to solve you weren’t even looking for.

On the other hand, if you want to collect quantitative feedback, closed-ended questions are perfect. Closed-ended questions are those that provide pre-defined options such as:

  • 1-10 scales

  • Single choice

  • Multiple choice

  • Rank order

These types of questions help you understand benchmarks and trends, which are helpful when running surveys over time.

Where possible, try to avoid yes/no answers, but if you do, remember to ask why (and what, which, how, and describe to get more qualitative feedback beyond just ‘yes’ or ‘no’.) This ensures you’re digging deeper and not getting lost just on what the data alone is telling you, but what the customer is telling you.

Send targeted surveys

In order to get the most out of product research you need to understand who it is you’re targeting.

User segmentation will give you more precise insight into how different users interact with your app, whether it be based on role, status, or where in their own customer journey they’re at.

Userpilot segmentation

Userpilot segmentation.

You can also leverage custom events to show specific questions only to the part of the audience who has engaged with a specific feature of your app.

 

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Test and iterate

If you’re not quite sure how will users respond to your surveys, run a quick test with a small sample first.

Whether this is a segment of your users, community, or even your internal team, running a sample batch will help you assess if you’re setting this up for success and really getting the answers you need.

Testing can only help you optimize the survey so you can get the most out of it.

Examples of good in-app survey questions

As we’ve seen, triggering in-app survey questions can provide insights for a variety of different teams and help you find areas of improvement for your product.

To make this list a bit more digestible, I thought it’d be handy to divide this based on purpose.

Market research and user persona survey questions

To gather qualitative data about your new users, their main pain points, and users’ expectations from your app, collect customer feedback with a welcome survey, so you can customize their in-app experience to their role, goals, Job-To-Be-Done, and use case.

welcome survey

Userpilot’s welcome survey.

User persona in-app survey questions include:

  • What is your role in your company?

  • What will you be using the product mainly for?

  • What ‘job’ are you primarily ‘hiring’ our product to do for you?

  • What do you want to achieve with our app?

  • Will you be using this product alone or as a part of a team?

  • Have you used a similar product before is it the first time you’re using X (e.g. an email marketing tool)?

  • How does the app compare with competitors?

  • Are you moving from another tool? Which one?

Market research questions include:

  • What price would you be willing to pay for our product? (multiple choice)

  • How clear do you find our pricing? (scale)

  • How would you rate the product’s value for money? (scale)

  • If the pricing were to change, would you be happy to pay more? Why or why not?

User satisfaction and user experience survey questions

User satisfaction and user experience surveys can collect both quantitative feedback and qualitative feedback. It all depends on the goal you have in mind for the survey.

You can collect data about your users’ overall satisfaction, or go into more detail with a specific feature or a resource.

in-app survey

Customer experience survey example.

You can measure customer satisfaction and customer experience with NPS, CSAT, and CES surveys that mostly collect quantitative data. However, you can add a follow-up question that can include the following questions:

  • How would you rate our product as compared to our competitors?

  • How would you feel if you had to stop using our product?

  • Would you recommend our product to others?

  • How was your experience with [new feature]?

  • Can you report issues that ruin your experience with us?

UX survey questions

UX survey is one of the most common UX research methods for getting both qualitative and quantitative insights from your users. You should conduct UX surveys across all customer journey stages to identify what’s blocking users from progress.

ux survey

In-app UX survey example.

Ask these questions to elicit general product feedback and make changes to your app design:

  • Is there anything you feel our product could do better?

  • How satisfied are you with the performance/stability of our product? (scale)

  • We are looking to solve [problem x] – how would solving this problem with our product be helpful for you?

  • How would you rate the usefulness of our product? (scale)

  • How does this design make you feel? (multiple choice + text field)

  • How easy was it to complete task x? (scale)

Ask these questions to elicit feedback on particular feature/ product launches:

  • How does this feature solve your problem/help accomplish your goals? Why or why not?

  • Were you able to reach the desired outcome with our product/feature? Why or why not?

Customer service experience questions

  • Was the support representative able to resolve the issue?

  • Are you satisfied with the help our support team provided?

  • How would you rate your experience with {team member}?

in-app survey

Customer service experience survey example.

Beta program survey questions

When working on new features, you implement beta testing to get valuable insights about your features, so your development team can work on improving them. Here are some questions you can implement to get better feedback:

  • How would you rate our beta program?

  • Did you find it easy to know your responsibilities as a tester?

  • How easy was it to report issues you encountered?

  • Do you have any suggestions or comments about our beta program?

  • How would you rate our new feature? Do you have any suggestions on how we can improve it?

Churn survey questions

Churn surveys are how you gather feedback from users after they decide to cancel or downgrade their subscription plan. The goal behind using churn surveys is to gather customer feedback so you can act on it to improve the product and reduce churn.

Churn survey questions examples include:

  • What’s the main reason you are canceling your account?

  • Why did you decide to cancel your subscription?

  • What made you cancel your account?

Don’t forget to leave a page for open-ended questions so users can write in their words why they canceled.

churn survey

Churn survey example.

 

Create and design surveys with Userpilot!

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How Userpilot can help you with your in-app surveys

If you’re looking for a quick and easy way to implement various types of micro surveys and experiences for your product, look no further.

Userpilot was designed for you. Userpilot is a powerful product adoption platform that enables you to quickly build personalized, flexible, contextually relevant in-app experiences targeted to different user segments – all without writing a line of code.

The advantage of using Userpilot for collecting feedback is that you can better control who sees the surveys but also you can instantly use the data collected to segment your user base and trigger the right experience for them.

However, Userpilot support only web/desktop apps, so you won’t be able to create mobile app survey questions for mobile app users.

Create and customize in-app surveys

With Userpilot, you can build and trigger in-app micro surveys like the classic PMF survey, or similar ones and mix multi-choice and open-ended types of questions to collect specific insights.

Moreover, you can collect and track (NPS) in-app with a built-in NPS widget that allows you to fully customize the survey look and feel, and set the trigger frequency and specific targeting.

Send surveys to a target audience

With Userpilot, you can be in charge of who gets which survey type and when with advanced segmentation capabilities, and of course, you can use the answers to segment your audience.

Moreover, if your users give you a low NPS score because they think you’re missing a critical feature (that you actually have already), you can trigger an interactive walkthrough guiding them to find and explore this feature.

Tag NPS survey responses

You can analyze NPS scores, tag responses, and use the data to create specific user segments. Also, analyze your survey feedback in detail:

Conclusion

App surveys are the single most effective and sophisticated way of improving user experience and product development, along with innumerable benefits. 

Now that you know everything about app survey questions, from what they are and how to deploy them, you will need a tool capable of doing so.

At the end of the day, how you adapt to user feedback can make or break your future growth. If you want to start collecting feedback from users or build an NPS survey without writing a single line of code then it’s time to get a Userpilot demo today!

Try Userpilot for in-app surveys today!

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