Continuing our previous post, “4 User Experience Questions to Include in Your Survey,” what questions you ask should be combined with best practices on user experience surveys. Not everyone reports a similar experience, so it behooves you to learn how you can best survey your target audience’s experience that gives you actionable feedback across a range of those surveyed.
While it’s important to know what you should ask your clients, the structure of a client-centric survey helps you pinpoint the “how” and “why” of survey questions. Combining “what,” “how,” and “why” gives you a more in-depth look at your target audience’s response to your surveys.
Why survey?
A survey built on best practices is a powerful tool based on an inexpensive method of interaction with clients. You can target your audience to help you understand exactly where, when, how, and why your clients purchase from your organization based on a few simple questions.
More importantly, uncover your goals. What do you hope to learn from a survey? Who is your ideal audience, and what are their demographics? Consider how you can use subgroups to identify highly specific feedback on your product/service.
How to survey?
You want more than a simple “yes” or “no” answer. You want context. Consider combining questions that illicit both “yes” or “no” answers with non-structured answers to help you gauge a deeper understanding of your target audience’s responses. Both highly structured (“yes” and “no” questions) and open-ended questions will give you a greater understanding of where and how your target audience interacts with your product or service.
But these are not the only questions to ask. Consider how you can combine multiple-choice questions with filtering questions like “What do you like most?”. Other ways to survey your target audience include ranking questions that help you understand on a scale or spectrum how your target audience feels about your product/service and its capabilities.
When you choose open-ended questions, you may need to include follow-up questions and partially structured questions. These let your respondents answer specific questions and add more if they want. For example, if you’re surveying a population about a new food/dining experience, get your target audience’s age, gender, location, profession, and more. When you combine that with deeper questions, you can gauge their personal tastes, preferences, opinions, and more.
What to survey?
Let’s look at a new food/dining experience as discussed above. What would you survey to help you determine the viability of your enterprise and how you might plan for the future? Both open-ended and specific “yes” or “no” questions will help you get a wider view of what your demographic wants and needs. Here’s a look at a variety of questions to consider:
- Closed ended: Did you eat at X restaurant in the past six months?
- Categorical question: What dinner options did you enjoy most?
- Filtering question: How often do you go out to eat?
- Follow-up question: What was enjoyable/not enjoyable about your dining experience?
- Open ended: Why would you return or not return to our restaurant?
- Scaled question: On a scale of disagree to agree, rate your likelihood of “I would always consider the restaurant when dining out” or “I would never consider this restaurant when dining out.”
- Partially unstructured question: What reasons would cause you to avoid this restaurant?
Evaluating your surveys
Your target audience can offer scads of data if you have the time to clean it up and analyze its meaning. Most survey data is a mess; some respondents don’t answer the pre-defined choice or answer questions that aren’t listed. It’s up to you to clean the data and remove any unnecessary information. (Cleaning your data is an entirely different post.)
Once you feel you have a suitable data set, start with sample size. You need a sufficient sample size to extrapolate real meaning. You’ve cleaned your data; is your sample size large enough to give you an accurate result of everything you need to measure?
Next, tabulating your data is key to understanding your basic information. You have options: easily tabulate your straightforward questions (“yes” or “no”) in a one-way table.
Then, cross tabulate the remaining data. Separate your subgroups and analyze and compare information. Check how your respondents answered questions according to your subgroups.
Try to avoid looking at data and instead focus on insights. This may be highly subjective, but it can provide a wide range of information.
Final thoughts
This post covers the basics of surveying and analyzing resulting data. Performing a deep dive into your data can offer even more insights into how, what, when, and why your target audience engages with your product or service. Surveys are the primary vehicles today that help you uncover what your target audience is thinking and what they want most.
When you fulfill your target audience’s wants, dreams, and desires, you’re positioned to succeed.
