What is a UX Survey and How to Conduct One?

What is a UX Survey?

UX survey is one of the most common UX research methods for getting both qualitative and quantitative insights from your users.

It helps you better understand customer behavior and determine what works and what doesn’t so you can prioritize improvements to your product’s UX.

Why do UX surveys matter?

As a SaaS company seeking sustainable business growth, UX surveys provide a cost-effective way to collect customers’ insights and make data-driven decisions.

UX surveys help uncover friction points in your product’s UX design and give you the right insights to optimize the user experience.

Improved user experience naturally reduces churn and increases retention.

When to conduct UX surveys

Gathering customer feedback isn’t a one-time thing, you should continuously collect and act on it.

It is important to conduct UX surveys at multiple touchpoints of the customer journey. It will help you determine what’s preventing your user from progressing through each stage so that you can eliminate those factors.

Analyzing the data will help you determine if certain features need to be enhanced or if a brand new feature is needed.

Types of UX survey

The type of user experience survey you should use depends on the kind of information you want to capture from them. This section will describe the various types you can deploy and the purposes they serve.

Customer effort score surveys

CES surveys determine how easy it is for users to interact with your product features. Customer effort spans various activities, including contacting support, using a feedback widget on your UI, or upgrading to a new tier.

A high score, in this case, means that users find your product easy to use to accomplish their goals.

Customer satisfaction surveys

A CSAT survey measures the level of satisfaction users have after engaging with your product or service.

In order to understand the overall level of satisfaction users have with your product, you should measure CSAT at different touchpoints within the user journey.

NPS surveys

NPS surveys give you insights into how loyal your customer is and help you proactively resolve problems that are making users unhappy.

Looking at the qualitative data collected with NPS surveys will get insights into what makes users stay loyal so you can replicate that experience to other relevant user segments.

Close-ended questions for collecting quantitative data

Closed UX survey questions will provide you with quantitative insights that are easy to gather and analyze.

These questions usually come with a radio button, checkbox, or other types of scale and number.

It’s advisable to start your surveys with one or two closed-ended questions to gather quantitative information with minimum user effort. Oftentimes, their response rates are higher because they are quick to respond and don’t require much thought.

Open-ended questions for qualitative research

After you’ve segmented the responses from your quantitative surveys, you should follow up with open-ended questions.

Using an open-ended question in your UX survey allows customers to give more qualitative insights into their expectations, experiences, and pain points.

Incorporating an open-text field in your survey requires more effort from users and your product team. But the insightful feedback you’ll receive can inspire significant UX changes that result in a better user experience.

Look at how Slack does it. They use predefined answers that help users self-identify and then give them the option to add details with an open-ended question type.

Step-by-step guide for designing a UX survey

Since we’ve discussed what UX surveys are and why they are important, let’s dive into the process of creating one.

Step 1: Determine your goals and set expectations

Before sending out a UX survey to your users, outline the end goal of the research.

What aspects of your product or design are you looking to improve? What are you trying to learn about your users?

Step 2: Design the survey

The next step is to convert your core objectives into UX survey questions. Ensure that the survey questions are relevant, straightforward, and contextual.

Then, decide on the type of survey that will best fit your needs.

This is also the stage where you decide the look and feel of your survey. Some pertinent questions you must ask yourself at this stage are:

• Would you use a multiple-choice question or leave open-ended ones?
• Would you rather use icons or numbers to gather quantitative data?

You can also decide on the strategic use of colors, fonts, and icons to ensure that the survey design aligns with your company branding.

Step 3: Recruit participants

It’s impossible to get relevant feedback from your audience if you’re not asking the right questions to the right users.

To recruit the right participants for your survey, segment your audience based on the objective of your survey.

For example, if you want to improve a specific feature, it makes sense to collect data from users who have used it more than once.

Step 4: A/B test different versions of your survey

You can run an A/B test to see if you can increase the response rate with minor changes to your survey. Think placement, the number of questions, when you trigger it, etc.

In Userpilot, you can embed different surveys into different UI patterns, and do A/B test experiments for a specific period of time to see which type of survey works best in which scenario.

Step 5: Analyze the collected data

Feedback analysis is probably the most crucial part of this process as it involves turning users’ qualitative and quantitative data into actionable insights that facilitate product improvement.

One way to analyze customer feedback is by tagging NPS survey responses.

NPS response tagging allows you to track low-score responses and uncover the patterns making your users give you a low score.

Step 6: Close the feedback loop

The last step in this process is to close the feedback loop by acknowledging your customers’ answers and letting them know you’re doing your best to improve the product and their overall experience with your brand.

UX survey best practices

Finally, let’s discuss the best practices for implementing UX surveys.

Keep questions short and simple

Your UX survey questions should focus on one point at a time. Since it takes less effort for respondents to answer short and simple questions, they are more likely to complete the questionnaire.

Avoid bias

Make sure you are avoiding bias before you launch your survey. Here are a few things to keep in mind as you design your survey questions:

• The framing effect: asking questions in a way that prompts a specific answer from your users
• Unbalanced scale: similar to the framing effect, unbalanced scales will sway answers by limiting users’ choices
• Confirmation bias: seeking only the data that confirms your beliefs

Show surveys to relevant users

It’s vital to trigger surveys for relevant users only. Imagine a situation where you ask a user to give their opinion on a feature they haven’t used yet.

Weird, right?

You should aim to trigger surveys based on customer engagement and where they are in their journey. For example, if the user just used a certain feature, trigger a survey and ask them how was their experience with it and whether they would like to change anything about that feature.

Don’t force surveys on customers

Some users may not be in the mood to complete the survey whenever you want them to. Don’t cause friction by forcing them to fill out the form to continue using the product.

Allow them to skip the survey, or even better, offer an always-on feedback widget so they can share their ideas whenever they feel like it.

You can embed this on various pages inside your product so it comes in handy or add the option to submit feedback through your in-app resource center (you can build one code-free with Userpilot).

Include both open-ended and closed-ended questions

We’ve already gone over why this is important.

Closed questions offer only a measure of quantitative data, while open-ended questions on their own are used for qualitative research. Although helpful, when used alone, these questions can limit the range of user feedback you collect when not used together.

A combination of these question types in your UX survey will result in accurate data and well-rounded insights into the user experience.

Offer incentives for completing long surveys and giving detailed feedback

Users don’t like filling out surveys with endless questions, so it’s better to design short surveys and then reach out to some of the respondents to ask them for detailed feedback.

To encourage your respondents, provide incentives for their time and effort.

Incentives can be in form of discounts, monetary compensation, or access to premium features in your app -the bigger the ask (aka the effort required to fill in the survey), the bigger the reward should be.

Best tools for conducting user experience surveys

There are numerous tools in the market for designing customized UX surveys. Let’s look at two of them: Userpilot – for short in-app surveys and Typeform – for longer-form surveys that can be embedded.

Userpilot

Userpilot is the best tool for conducting UX research using in-app microsurveys. These are short, timely, and contextual UX surveys that provide you with valuable insights.

With Userpilot’s advanced segmentation feature, you can trigger the microsurvey for the relevant audience and collect detailed feedback from the right users.

If you need more in-depth information from your respondents, creating a long-form survey is a better option. You can embed the Typeform survey form into your app using a modal for example.

This works better than sending it via email especially if you are trying to get feedback from active users. Ask them for feedback where they are, in a contextual way, of course.

Emails get ignored or missed. Embed your Typeform surveys in-app and increase the response rate.

Typeform

Typeform is one of the best platforms to design beautiful long-form surveys.

With its branching pathways and logic jumps, you can further personalize your UX survey by triggering a new question based on the user’s previous responses.

However, this survey tool falls short because of its disruptive nature. Typeform redirects the user outside the app to answer the survey, thereby interrupting their product experience.

Conclusion

The process of designing a user experience survey would seem daunting when you consider all the techniques outlined in this article.

But when you use a tool and build surveys without code, it gets easier to reach relevant users and collect the insights needed to improve the product.

Get a Userpilot Demo and see how you can create targeted in-app surveys for better customer insights.