How to Creating a User-friendly Survey
that will Get you Accurate Results

Writing your first user survey requires a lot of time and patience. Not following common user survey practices will leave you with results that will potentially hurt your future marketing, design, and business decisions. Once you understand the basics of user surveys you will be on your way to creating a user-friendly survey that collects useful results. This blog post will cover common user interview mistakes, so you can avoid them moving forward.

Relevancy and Accuracy

Relevancy, (the state of being closely connected) and accuracy (the state of being correct or precise) are two important factors to keep in mind when creating a user survey. A well-structured user survey that contains simply written questions will help you collect valid survey responses (Survey Monkey, 2019). Relevancy and accuracy drive the outcome of creating a reliable survey.

The following topics below are common mistakes found in user surveys. It is imperative to follow these topics to collect accurate and organized data.

Your Objective

Be sure to be well prepared with all the information you need before starting your user survey. This includes an overall objective of your survey and information you want to collect from your users. With your objective and information in place, you will be able to research objectives into a set of “information requirement”.

Word Choice

It is important to construct a clear user survey with direct questions and answers that use language that survey participants will understand. Although, you will want to be very precise with your questions word choice is key. Staying away from big words and phrases they may not understand will improve the overall clarity of your survey (Survey Monkey, 2019).

Also, be sure to not to lead your questions to suggestions. Overloading your questions with suggestive language will result in inaccurate results. For example, Mark Dixon uses this question “Now that you’ve seen how you can save time, would you buy our  product?”

to explain to his readers that this leading question will rely more on the participant’s emotions more than their facts (Dixon, M, 2019 Par. 4-6).

Grouping Topics

Grouping your survey questions into topics is a very important step that inexperienced survey authors often forget. To prevent yourself from shuffling questions around once you finish your survey you will want to create the structure before jumping in. This means grouping your questions by topic. For an example, the first five questions of your user survey can be on demographics, next five questions on your participant’s behavior, participates use with your application, website or product, and finally their knowledge of your survey subject. This will not only improve your participate’s experience with your user survey but also keep you organized when it comes to collecting your results.

Answer Types 

When it comes to creating the answers to your questions for your user survey it is extremely critical to utilize refined answer types. This includes but is not limited to, yes/no answers, likert scales, multiple choices, etc. These answer types will get you precise data that you can use to improve your application, website or product. Using a few open-ended can be done if absolutely necessary. However, open-ended answers are not recommended because they require a lot of extra time when it comes time collecting your results. Unless, your survey has ten or less participates stay away from open-ended answers as much as you can.

Here are a few Other Common Survey Mistakes:

• Redundant questions
• Questions that you do not need the answers for
• No demographic questions
• Questions without visuals
• Sampling Error (Stanley, 2011 Par. 6-8)
• Measurement Error (Stanley, 2011 Par 9)

Sources

Image Source

Below you will find 5 sites I choose to demonstrate this with a brief summary of what they are successfully doing to increase traffic, time-on-page, conversion rates and referral traffic. Scroll down further to see how these points are successfully driving traffic 🙂 :

Airbnb does an incredible job storytelling throughout their site. Airbnb spends approximately 23.5 million U.S dollars a year on advertising. They are valued at 31 billion U.S dollars as of May 2017, with total equity funding of around 3.3 billion U.S dollars. Airbnb’s content strategy and elaborate use of digital storytelling differentiates Airbnb from their competitors. Airbnb stands for something much bigger than travel. Airbnb builds a mass community of relationships using technology for the purpose of bringing people together through storytelling.

When you arrive on the Airbnb homepage, the first element the users will often focus their attention on is the search box. The search box serves a door opening to your journey on Airbnb.com. This is ultimately where the users will begin their adventurous digital journey. You can search for experiences, homes and restaurants on Airbnb’s website. They also give their users recommendations, such as popular reservations, featured destinations and recommended experiences based on your location. Airbnb targets their users with personalized messaging and experiences to serve them the best experience on desktop, tablet and mobile on Airbnb.com.

Airbnbmag takes storytelling to a whole new level on print. Airbnbmag relies on it’s users searches to determine what they will include in your personalized Airbnbmag magazine. It is evident that Airbnb is using this old-fashion marketing to continue the story you begin on Airbnb’s website. What’s interesting about this is that Airbnb’s magazine introduces a new way for their audience to interact, connect and share Aibnb’s content. Furthermore, it targets different audiences. Such as users who are not highly dependable on technology or local shops that have a Airbnbmag subscription lying around. It is amazing what Airbnb can learn and produce from online research.

Adobe Stock provides a wide range of stock images on a monthly subscription. Unlike, other stock image serves Adobe offers Creative Cloud subscribers a discounted stock image plan. This encourages Adobe Creative Cloud users to chose Adobe Stock over similar services, such as Getty or Shutterstock.

It is evident that Adobe Stock uses their content marketing promotions to drive traffic to their online stock image service. You can get 10 free images to start. Using the word free is an excellent word to use in your marketing content when applicable. This will not only drive users to your website, but also will encourage them to share the promotion to their friends and family.

Adobe Stock’s SEO ranking score over other leading brands in the stock image service.

Adobe Stock also exposes their value for those who want to contribute to their stock photo gallery. Selling your media content to the world’s largest creative community is compelling and fun. Users looking to make profit off their photography will benefit from Adobe’s service. The combination of Adobe Stock’s content marketing perks and value increase traffic, time-on-page, conversion rates and their referral traffic.

Save Our Oceans is not a very common site, although I found their content marketing strategy and emails to be highly interactive and positive. Their emails are essentially what gets their users in the door.

I came across Save Our Ocean’s website from an advertisement on Facebook. This is how myself and thousands of other users were referred to their site. As you can see they effectively use email marketing to drive traffic to their website.

It is evident that their focus on email marketing is attracting new customers. Email marketing is a very powerful tool to convert users to customers.

If you’re lucky their ring may still be free.

Check it out – saveouroceansnow.com/products/premium-octopus-ring

M&M.com uses personalization to target specific audiences to their website. What I found interesting about M&M.com is that before you enter their site a dialog box will appear asking you what your birth date was.

Although, I found this to be a bit frustrating as a user trying to access their site, I recognized the benefit that this solution provides within their experience. Depending on how old you are the site will differ. If you are 12 or under, you will see candy targeting younger kids. If you are older than 12 you will no longer see M&M’s products targeting young kids.

M&M uses promotion codes to drive traffic to their site and reduce their bounce rate. Customers who are given promotions while browsing their purchase are more likely to stay. This is why promotion codes can easily direct traffic to your website. Popular sites like and coupons.com and retailmenot.com expose promotion codes which will ultimately refer customers to your website.

Fitbit has been my favorite site since their second tracker, Fitbit Flex was introduced in 2003. So, I couldn’t help but to add it into my list. As a web designer and an active customer it’s been fascinating to see their website and mobile application evolve into a huge success. Fitbit does a great job pushing traffic to their through motivating social media content and marketing techniques.

I love Fitbit’s flat UI design elements, professional lifestyle imagery and interactive branding elements. Their product description pages combine compelling imagery and interactive elements to drive customers to their website. I find that these pages tell a great story and trigger emotional connections for users to absorb. They create lasting impressions that will bring returning users to their site. Ultimately, increasing their websites bounce rate.

Word of mouth from leading technology companies can often generate and increases exposure and reliability. When these type of articles are shared, so does the traffic to their website.

Fit Coach is an iOS and Android application that creates personalized workouts that adjust to your capabilities, feedback and goals. The application is free and the user does not have to own a Fitbit. These qualities are important, because they will educate and introduce the user about Fitbit the brand and their website prior to purchasing their device.