Surveys indeed require time and effort on the issuer’s part, so the question is, “does it pay off?” In short, yes. You need website visitors to have a good experience when they visit your website since it is an expectation. Furthermore, failure to deliver a positive experience can detract visitors from ever coming back. Consider that visitors might quickly flock to one of your competitors if your design is confusing or filled with bugs.
As a result, website owners and UX design agency Bay Area often look to user experience (UX) surveys as powerful tools for collecting feedback and learning about visitor behavior. In application, these tools give website owners insights into how people are experiencing the page and provide a foundation to understand what is working and what isn’t as your development team starts on improvements.
What Is A Website Survey?
A website survey is a method of gaining qualitative and quantitative feedback on a webpage or an entire website directly from the end-user. These surveys may include a series of open-ended or close-ended questions but are most likely to include a combination of both. Marketers often use these tools to increase the number of returning visitors or the number of leads in the case of a business website. Although the feedback collected benefits the website owner directly, it also helps the end-user with a better experience that they informed.
Due to the increasing importance of UX surveys, many web hosting platforms already provide plug-ins or other widgets to simplify the survey creation process. UX research methods determine what to ask.
Setting Up Your Online Survey
With the value of collecting good feedback in mind, it is up to you to determine how you will design your survey and begin collecting responses. Below, we consider a breakdown of the steps to do so.
Selecting Your Feedback Tool
With on-site tools, website owners can understand who their visitors are and what brought them to your website. These tools deliver this information in the user’s own words, giving insights into a visitor’s true satisfaction levels. However, since multiple tools exist, website owners must consider pricing, features, and ease of integration before making a decision.
Determine Your Survey Goals
Before writing your survey questions, users are encouraged to determine what they hope to achieve through these efforts. At this stage, questions worth asking include, “why is our team sending this survey? and “are there any specific features we are hoping to get feedback on?”
With the answers to these questions in mind, users will be able to better plan and write their associated surveys. Essentially, users will have a foundation or guide with which to follow by taking this step.
Compare Survey Types
Online surveys may take a few different forms, perhaps the most common being a pop-up. With a pop-up website survey, visitors see the questions automatically after meeting a certain trigger event. Although this type of survey is hard to ignore, it is also considered more intrusive than the widget survey alternative, which appears in the corner of a page as an “optional to complete form.”
Pinpointing Location
After narrowing down what data you hope to glean, survey conductors will need a more detailed plan to target the right people with the right message. Your survey will need to exist somewhere, whether sent through email or a part of the website browsing experience.
If you decide to incorporate the survey as a part of your website, the next question will be, “which pages will prompt the survey?” Analysts often use Google Analytics (GA) tools to determine which pages attract the audiences they hope to target.
Design for Simplicity
After determining the goals of your survey, website owners must determine how they can make the process of answering the questions as simple as possible. For example, most users are unlikely to want to complete a survey in the first place unless companies give them a gift card or other monetary incentive. Therefore, if your team cannot provide this, it is in your best interest to keep the survey short by reducing the number of questions or clicks by eliminating free-form responses.
Consider the Timing
Following this step, survey conductors are encouraged to consider what stage of the user journey they will prompt feedback. For example, if the website visitor is purchasing online, your site might encourage them to answer a few survey questions based on their most recent buying experience. By doing so, website visitors will have some context for the survey they fill out.
Optimize for Mobile
It is no secret the world is moving to mobile at an increasing pace. With more active mobile users than ever before, it is more than likely that your visitors will answer your website survey on a mobile device. Therefore, it becomes crucial to optimize the survey experience for these devices by using a responsive design with clickable answers instead of open-ended questions.
Collect Responses
Once you are satisfied with your website design, you are ready to make your work live and start receiving responses. Launching your website survey is likely the simplest step in the process, often requiring the click of a button to deploy. The tool you choose in a previous step will then do its job and serve up the survey to eligible visitors. The only time you may need to intervene will come down to the occurrence of a glitch that may require some minor tweaking to keep running.
Most analysts will have predetermined the number of responses they would need to draw statistically significant solutions. Therefore, it is then the survey conductor’s job to wait until at least that many people have submitted responses.
Analyze Results
Upon receiving feedback from your online survey, users will have some insight into their end-users, needs, and intent. Keep in mind that depending on how you choose to set up your survey, there is a chance that the survey will already group respondents accordingly. For example, your survey may only be available when website visitors access a page like your blender product description. Therefore, your survey audience is already grouped or segmented in a way that allows users to go ahead and start looking at the results. In contrast, website owners running generic campaigns for general feedback will likely have to segment these audiences before comparing the results.
Once you have had a chance to turn the raw data from survey responses into analysis reports digestible by your less technical team members, you will be well equipped to deliver suggestions for an improved UX. Following this step, teams can prioritize concepts and continually test them (potentially through an A/B test) until they determine the most optimized version of their website.
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