Surveys are an excellent tool to remotely gather information from a large audience. Done right, they can provide the information you and your team need to make good decisions from engaged respondents who are happy to help you. However, their flexibility opens them up for a number of risks.

In the first episode on this topic, I share a few general points to help you frame your survey in the right way.

Transcript

One of the most powerful ways to learn about your users, stakeholders, colleagues, and pretty much anyone else is the humble survey. But with great power comes great responsibility.

Hello, and welcome to product nuggets. My name is Thomas Essl. One of the things I get asked about more than others, is how to best use surveys, constructing and sending surveys very easy to do, but it's very hard to get right. A good survey can help you get a lot of intelligence and getting the number and quality of responses you and your team need to make good decisions. They can ensure that your respondents are engaged And happy to help you with getting it wrong can annoy the hell out of them and make sure that they never talk to you again. To help you make sure that you get this right. I'll share a range of tips for better surveys based on the questions I get asked a lot of the time and some of the mistakes that I've seen done more often.

There is a lot to be said about surveys and that's why I've dedicated not one but two episodes to this topic. It may not seem like the most exciting thing in a while to talk about, but I really do believe that getting this right will make your work a ton easy. Today's episode, I'll talk a little bit about guiding principles and everything that can goes around creating a really successful survey. The next time we'll address more granular advice on survey design itself. You can then use both episodes as a kind of checklist. For your own work, depending on which phase of the serene effort you're in. So without further ado, let's dive in. And let's start with some guiding principles and general points. If you internalize these, everything else should kind of just come together.

The first one is just be respectful. respondents are doing you a huge favor, because nothing in life is more valuable than our time and they are giving it up for you to learn something about them their behavior in the preferences, or whatever it is, we may want to look to find out. So you have an obligation to be very thoughtful about providing a great experience from your survey design to everything else that follows around it. The emails you send What you do with the results, and so on.

The second point is reduce cognitive load. And that really just means make it as easy for people as possible to respond to your survey, the more they have to think about their responses and the harder it is to answer. The more time it will take, the more false replies you will get and the more likely they are to abandon the survey. If you make it really easy to intuitively answer questions that'll go quite far away to show respect to your respondents and also to get you the right data that you need.

Another point is be mission-oriented. Having a good reason why you are sending out a survey in the first place is very important. This should not be taken lightly. Sometimes people just say like, Oh, that's just another survey. See what people think. It's not a big deal. But it is though, so you must be sure that you really have a clear reason for sending that survey in You don't divert from it. Don't just ask questions just while you're at it. And also, this is my next point. Ask yourself if you really need this survey in the first place. Are there any questions that would be better answered by something else? For example, analytics? A famous question is, which browser are you using? Well, you can answer that question just by looking at Google Analytics, for example.

Next point is sort of to help you prepare, and it is to conduct qualitative interviews to inform your survey questions. Sometimes, surveys are used as the first sort of way to conduct your research. And I would discourage you from doing that because qualitative research one to one conversations with people can be really powerful to tell you what you actually need to find out and what you need to ask in the first place. I often talk of those unknown unknowns that are really Hard to kind of gather in a survey sort of format and are very easy to get a grip on in a small number of one to one conversations. So do those and then make sure that informs whatever it is you're actually asking a larger population. And you can then do that by including multiple choice options, rather than, you know, full text questions. Again, something would come to bit down the line.

When you send out your survey, make sure you introduce it, but briefly, participants tend to not read an awful lot. So you have to Keep it really short. But you should absolutely tell your audience why they are receiving this survey and what you will be doing with the data that's being collected? And importantly, what impact will it have just knowing what your team will achieve with the responses that they're getting, can really motivate people to respond to your service and to take the time necessary to go through with it. I think all of us are more likely to follow through with and ask for a favor if we understand why it is important. And if you describe that to your audience, it'll have the same effect before you send out your survey. I really strongly encourage you to use a tested. If you take nothing else away from this episode, it should be this one. Just give the survey to someone watch them go through it. Have them speak out loud what they are thinking as they do so and without the shadow of a doubt. You will learn about areas that can be improved, both for the participant experience and the quality of the data. You'll get back crucially, measure how long it takes to complete, and then tell users in your actual survey introduction, how long it will take to set expectations correctly. And how many times have you been told it will only take a minute to fill in this quick survey, just to be confronted with an endless stream of free text entries, that would take way longer to fill in in a thoughtful way that is very frustrating. So setting those expectations correctly, based on information you've gathered during the pilot is really, really important. But as I said, that's not the only reason why you should do that. I also really think that 10 out of 10 times if you pilot your survey, you will make changes to it before you send it out. And it will have been worthwhile to do center survey at a sensible time as well. in a corporate environment, maybe lunchtime, so Friday afternoons might work best when people are kind of tending to procrastinate a little bit more. But really, this is gonna vary dramatically depending on what sort of context you're you're sending your survey into. You can read up online, what seems to be a sensible time for your particular context and audience, and then just monitor that over time. Oftentimes, we kind of want to send out surveys on a regular basis and observe the results that we're getting and how they change over time. And you can use that to sort of iterate on when the best moment in time is depending on what sort of response rates you see each time around.

And this is it for today, it's a little warm up into surveys if you like. I hope you found it useful. Don't forget to tune in again in two weeks when I go into more detail into the granular ways in which to design your survey for the best and most responses you can possibly get. If you liked this episode, please subscribe and rate it on iTunes, Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts. I'd also love to hear from you. If you have any thoughts on this show, you can get in touch with me via Twitter at Thomas underscore SL, or email me to Hello at Thomas essl.com. The show is produced by me at the theme song is aeronaut by blue dot sessions and the opinions expressed in this episode on my own do not reflect those of my employer. Thank you for listening Till next time, goodbye. Transcribed by https://otter.ai