Surveys (Online)
What is an online survey?
Online surveys are structured interviews with users, where you display a list of questions online and record users' responses.
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What can you learn from an online survey?
When you conduct an online survey, you have an opportunity to learn many types of information about who the users of your site are, how they use your site, and their opinions about your site. Some information you may want to consider collecting includes:
- Who are the users of your site?
- What do users want to do on your site?
- What information are users looking for?
- Were users able to find the information they were looking for?
- How satisfied are users with your site?
- What experiences have users had with your site or similar sites?
- What do users like best about your site?
- What do users like least about your site?
- What frustrations or issues have users had with your site?
- Do users have any ideas or suggestions for improvements?
Surveys can also be used to allow users to rate or rank the features on your site or provide ideas for future improvements.
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When should you conduct an online survey?
You can use this technique at any stage of development:
- Before you re-design your Web site to learn more about who the current users of your Web site are and what they want to do on your site.
- After you launch a new design to see if your new design meets the needs of users and identify areas for improvement.
An online survey can also be a persistent item on your site that allows you to continually gauge how users view your site and identify ways to make the site better.
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How do you conduct a survey?
- Decide why you are surveying your users.
- Decide where you will find the people you want to survey.
- If you already have a site, post it there.
- Also consider other sites where users for your site might go and obtain permission to announce your survey there.
- Consider getting permission to send broadcast email about the survey to lists of potential users through professional societies, listservs, discussion groups, etc. Be sure to get permission from the list owners before broadcasting email.
- Keep the survey short. Under 10 items is preferable.
- Make the survey easy for users to do. It should take no more than five or 10 minutes to complete.
- Consider a mix of closed questions (multiple choice) and open-ended questions (users write down what they want to tell you).
- Closed questions are easier to analyze.
- Open-ended questions may give you richer data and offer a glimpse at the terminology your users use.
- Consider a mix of questions about demographics, users' prior experiences, and what users want to find on your site.
- Consider using a series of surveys:
- Gather information with a short survey that you make available where many people might see it and respond.
- On the survey, ask if people are willing to answer more in-depth questions - and ask those people to give you an email address.
- Send follow-up electronic questionnaires to willing respondents who meet your criteria for the type of users you want to know more about.
- Consider combining an online survey with individual interviews.
- With an online survey, you reach many people in many places, but you don't get the depth of data that you get from individual interviews.
- If you do individual interviews first, you get good ideas for survey questions - and for the items on multiple-choice survey questions.
- If you do individual interviews after gathering some survey data, you get to follow up with some people on issues and ideas that come from the survey answers.
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Next steps
You should use the information gathered from the online survey to supplement the other types of data you collect when you Learn About Your Users.
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