What is a UX research survey?

The user research survey serves as the foundation for user experience testing. It is the initial stage in figuring out user behavior. User personas are created from the findings of user research surveys.

Consider user research surveys as a fishing rod that helps you catch fish in deep water where they swim — gain insights into your audience's unknowns, interests, and expectations.

User research surveys are very cost-effective and can be conducted online. We can reach a larger audience with user surveys as compared to user interviews or focus groups.

How to design user surveys for UX research?

Designing a user survey is a very crucial part of the user research process. A badly design survey can lead us to waste of time and inaccurate results regarding user experience.

Here are some of the best practices to design effective user surveys, which can help designers to get quality survey results and insight regarding user behavior.

1. Check participant’s attention and accuracy in filling survey

Sometimes, participants of the user survey quickly go through the survey without reading the questions properly. There are mainly two reasons

1. They are in a hurry.
2. They just complete a survey in order to get an incentive.

This results in bad user research survey data. Which might not be valuable for the design decisions. To avoid situations like this, we should add question like below in the middle of the survey.

User survey multiple choice question

This question will help us to know “How much users are paying attention to the question” and “How accurately users are answering the survey questions”. We can easily identify those participants who submitted the user survey poorly. We can remove their data from survey results and mark their data as not qualified. We should not provide any incentives to these users.

This technique helps to improve the quality of user research data and helps designers to get true insights of the research purpose.

2. Check the background Knowledge of the target audience

There are many situations where we need to do survey of a very specific target audience. For example, Marketing people. In this situation, it is necessary to make sure that only marketing people fill our survey. In order to make sure, we should add a question that checks the background knowledge of the participant.

Here is the example question to check the background knowledge of the marketing survey participants.

User survey question to check background knowledge of marketing people.

By including questions like the above, we can identify if participants’ data is qualifiable or not. This will help us to improve the quality of the research results.

3. Don’t force users to answer any question.

There are situations where participants can not answer a particular user survey question because they did not have any related past experience. And to successfully fill out the survey, users need to answer all the compulsory questions. In this situation, the user will choose any random answer option and it will lead to inaccurate user research results.

To avoid these kinda situations, we can add an option like “NO PREFERENCE” in multiple choice questions.

Multiple choice question with ‘no preference’ option.

In the above example question, the user will choose the option ‘No preference’ instead of selecting a random response if they never used the XYZ app on the smartphone.

Conclusion

Surveys can provide in-depth insights into the customer and the product interaction. If designed dexterously, it can strengthen the design process and provide a potential competitive advantage in overall product development.

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