Design

7 Tips For A Great UX Survey Result

June 3, 2020

Michal Langmajer

Product Designer

It might seem like a trivial side-job, but user research is actually one of the most important activities for you to partake in. With a UX survey, you can find desired features which your customers miss, or identify unnecessary ones. Based on UX Survey, you make important decisions and plan your roadmap.

“Everything starts with the customer.” –June Martin

You definitely shouldn’t underestimate UX Survey. In this article, I focus on one of many research methods that are often chosen for its simplicity and velocity but, unfortunately, it’s often messed up. Let’s take a look at what this particular UX Survey method is all about, and the 7 tips for how to ensure that it’s conducted smoothly.

Here are 7 tips for an effective UX survey result:

1. Do Not Conduct A Questionnaire Survey

I really mean it. Do not conduct a questionnaire survey just for the sake of it. There has already been too much time wasted of poor people filling in bad questionnaires which nobody actually evaluates, and if they do, they evaluate it with meaningless results. Before you send out another questionnaire, think about following 3 questions:

Couldn’t you get the data somewhere else? If your UX survey is focused on general topics or demographic facts, there might already be some available results from other research. Do the secondary UX survey first and try to find your answers there. Also, don’t underestimate your analytical tools and previously conducted UX surveys.

Is the questionnaire an appropriate form of the UX survey? There are many UX survey methods out there such as questionnaires, interviews, observations, experimentation, focus groups, etc. When choosing the right method, think about the time that it will take, the data that you can obtain, and the richness of information that you hope to receive.

Will you really use the UX survey results? If you’re not sure just how you will utilize obtained data or what steps will be taken based on the result, then please save your time and the time of your respondents. Making a survey with no plan as to what to do with the data doesn’t make any sense!

2. Define The Goal of Your UX Survey

The most important activity before you actually start writing questions for your questionnaire is to set your goal. What do you want to achieve with your research and what decision will you make based on it? Without a clearly stated goal, it’s very difficult to design proper questions, find the right audience, and identify the right form for your UX Survey. Defining the meaning of your research might lead to a completely different form than a questionnaire. For instance, it could be more beneficial to use an interview, A/B test, or usability testing,...

Whether your goal is to validate your hypothesis, get users’ feedback on your product, Minimum Viable Product (MVP), or come up with new ideas, make sure you know what you need to find it all out.

If you have an idea but do not have enough resources to test or build the entire product, you can check out our article on building a Minimum Viable Product (MVP).

3. Ask Good Questions

Now, when you have defined what you want to accomplish, it’s time to write questions that will help you to achieve it. Don’t underestimate the ways in which you ask the question or its form. A poorly posed question can result in the wrong conclusions being drawn and it could even negatively affect your business. There are a few general principles which you should have on your mind while writing your questions:

Ask simple questions. Difficult concepts and long questions are hard to understand. They might result in the churn of your respondents.
Be specific and don’t beat around the bush.
Always ask only about your respondent’s opinion. Don’t ask what others think.

Don’t use hypothetical questions like “what would you do if…”. On hypothetical question, you’ll only get a hypothetical answer.
Have an option for everybody. If you’re not sure whether you listed all options, use an “other” option with an empty input field.

Avoid suggestive questions. Your goal with a UX Survey is to find out the truth. Not to confirm your previously existing beliefs or biases.

Avoid sensitive topics if not necessary. Touching God, politics, partnerships, multi-gender lifestyles, family, or income might result in an unpleasant situation.
If possible avoid open questions. They're hard to analyze often lead to no conclusion. I'm always trying to have at least meritory questions closed.
Don't change scale orientation. In case more questions are utilizing a Likert scale or other rating scales, don't change the scale direction. People get easily confused.

4. Remove All Unnecessary Questions

When you have a decent set of questions, it’s about time to throw away the useless ones. Every question in your survey should contribute to the goal that you’ve set at the beginning. Many times when I’m asked to give feedback for a UX survey, and I ask for the purpose of each question, I get the following reply: “Hmm, I was just interested in it.” or “I saw a similar survey and this question was on it… So I added it.”

None of these are a good reason to have a question in your survey. If the question does not help you get closer to your goal, it has no business being in your UX survey. Every extra irrelevant question simply lowers the chance of completion for the participants of your questionnaire.

The impact of the number of questions on the average completion rate. [5]

5. Ask The Right Question In The Right Moment

It’s important not only to ask good questions but to also ask them in the right moment. Think about your questionnaire like any other interface/system in which a user interacts with it. When you first meet with your new neighbor, “What’s your salary?” certainly isn’t the first question that comes out of your mouth. In fact, without a valid reason, there’s a good chance that you might never find yourself asking that question at all!

When it comes to a questionnaire, I’m always trying to start with the most interesting question to grab the respondent’s attention. It’s also called a hook question. After this hook question, you might continue with the rest of the key questions that are necessary for the validation of your hypothesis. It helps when you order the questions in a logical groups or in a way the tell a story.

The most critical questions should come with a control question to help validate whether or not the user is consistent in their opinions. It’s well known that people are notoriously bad at telling the truth.

Always visible progress bar while completing UX survey on typeform.com

Throughout the survey, you’re building trust and you’re forging a relationship with your respondent. The most sensitive and “boring” questions (like screening and demographics) should be placed right at the end of the questionnaire. Don’t forget to ask for each user’s email address. It’ll help you verify that a user is a real person and it’ll provide you with a contact in the event that you need to clarify some responses or if you want to invite the user for an additional interview.

6. Find The Right audience

The respondents of your survey should always be determined to answer by the survey objectives. When you’re examining eating habits of primary school children in eastern Europe, it doesn’t make sense to ask mid-age male adults from Asia. There are many ways to find an audience for your UX survey. I’ll mention 3 which worked best for me in the past and 1 that brought me very poor results.

✅ Ask Your Own Users

If you already have a product with a user base, don’t hesitate to ask them to participate in research. There isn’t a better and more relevant audience! Moreover, people love to occasionally contribute to the development of a product they like and your brand benefits from it because your customers see that you care about their opinions.

✅ Forums and Facebook Groups

If you’re starting a new product/service and don’t have customers yet, Facebook groups and forums might serve as a good starting point. Find groups which are thematically close to your business and survey their members. Before posting any questionnaire, always talk to the moderator first! Otherwise, you might violate their terms and damage your brand.

✅ Fake Door Landing Pages

When your product/service is not on the market yet or if you want introduce a new feature for a different audience than your current users, you can try to obtain your respondents through Fake Door Landing Pages. Create a one-page site that briefly describes your new business and asks visitors for their email addresses. Run a Facebook campaign to promote this page to your target audience. Then, survey those people.

The first and foremost important reason for the development of any new product is offering new value to the customer. For that, you have to clearly understand your customer needs and the best way to identify their monumental pain point is by using the kano model.

❌ Don’t Buy Research Panel Users

Remember, real insights come from real consumers. While buying panel users might seem easy, the results are often not based on reality. Participants recruited from these agencies in many cases do not fit the right target group and/or tend to fill the form in a hurry just to get the promised reward.

Also, do not forget to calculate how many responses you need to ensure that your findings are statistically significant. This article might help you calculate your sample size.

7. Pre-test Your UX Survey

Now, when you have prepared a set of questions that will help you to accomplish your research goal and you know who your respondents will be, my last tip is to pre-test your survey before you send it out to all of your potential respondents.

Send it to a few people, maybe your colleagues, friends or family. You will not count their responses into the results, but they will help you to validate that all of the included questions are understandable, that your survey doesn’t contain any unclear answer choices, and that the UX survey doesn’t lead to a dead end. It’s better to look awkward in front of a few friends than to end up with useless survey results.

Good luck with your UX survey!

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Project

1 min read

Pivot Like a Pro: Startup Strategies for Success

Cleevio

Company News

Discover the highlights from our recent exclusive panel discussion featuring Roman Stanek, CEO of GoodData, alongside industry leader Milo Poplar and our Head of North America, Filip Orth.

The event provided valuable insights into global-scale product building and entrepreneurial success. Dive into the key takeaways and memorable moments from this engaging discussion, where experienced pioneers shared their wisdom and expertise on the AI landscape.

We were thrilled to have Roman Stanek and his impressive track record in building successful startups. His journey began with the acquisition of NetBeans by Sun Microsystems in 1999, followed by the acquisition of Systinet by Hewlett Packard in 2006. Along the way, his ventures received support from renowned VC funds like a16z, Intel Capital, and General Catalyst.

Outsourcing

During the event, our discussions delved deeply into the strategies startups can employ to enhance efficiency through outsourcing across various operational domains. We explored how outsourcing can serve as a vital tool in mitigating the challenges inherent in the dynamic startup landscape. Among others, these challenges encompass navigating a tough fundraising environment and contending with fierce competition in virtually every industry.

Agility and adaptability

Central to our discussions was the imperative for startup founders to remain agile and adaptable in the face of evolving circumstances. We underscored the critical importance of being responsive to market shifts and customer demands, emphasizing the need for continual adjustment to ensure the longevity and success of their ventures.

Operational effectively

The ability to pivot effectively is essential, particularly when considering the quest for operational efficiency. In this context, leveraging outsourcing capabilities becomes paramount, whether it is in technological development, sales, marketing, or legal compliance. This strategic approach is especially pertinent in the current landscape, where fundraising endeavors are meeting with increased difficulty, and access to capital is more constrained than it was just two years ago.

Milo Poplar, Co-founder of Eldison during presentation

We intend to make this event a regular occurrence. We aim to host Founders’ Lounge regularly, each time focusing on a different theme and bringing in a special guest who will share insights from their entrepreneurial journey.

Are you a founder, investor, CTO or decision-maker in the technological startup environment seeking to accelerate your growth and gain a competitive edge in the market? Watch our LinkedIn for future invites!

Development

1 min read

Crash-Proofing Your Code: Setting Up Sentry on Android

Tomáš Dvořáček

Senior Android Developer

Welcome back! As promised, we are here with the second part of the Crash-proofing series. This time, we will show you how to set up Sentry for the Android platform and some nice-to-have stuff as a bonus.

Let's begin!

Create sentry.properties file inside your Android project’s root folder

Initial setup in Sentry Admin

These are a few things you need to do before implementing Sentry Android SDK.

Create a new project in Sentry. Give this project some appropriate name like your-project-android
Then go to Settings → Projects → Your new Project → General Settings

You should see the name of your project. This is your project_id. In sentry.properties, replace <project_id> with it
Then go to Organization settings → General Settings, copy your organisation_slug and replace <organisation_slug> inside sentry.properties

Then go to User and tokens and create new Token. You can add every permission to it for a start but its better to check every permission and decide for yourself what is needed.

Then copy your new auth token and replace <auth_token> with it inside sentry.properties.Sentry can upload ProGuard mapping files for you and needs this auth token. Ignore this if you don’t care about ProGuard
Your sentry.properties should be filled now.
Then go to Settings → Projects → Your new Project → Client Key (DSN)
Get your DSN link and save it somewhere for now.

Now you can return to your Android Project

Adding sentry to project

A full tutorial is on this page. Sentry can set itself with a command, but if you prefer a manual approach or have problems, follow the instructions below or this page. Sentry will also give you a direct link for setup in Android Studio (https://sentry.io/organizations/XXX/projects/YYY/getting-started/)

Add this to your main module build.gradle

Open your application class and initiate Sentry

Let’s explore what each line does:

This line applies the environment to the issue. If you use several build flavors like development and production, you can then easily filter specific flavors.

These lines set the percentage value of how many traces to log. 100% means everything is logged. It’s not recommended to collect everything in a production environment; however, e.g., on development, it’s a good thing since testers could find bugs. In our example, we set the percentage on the release version to 10%.

Open your AndroidManifest.xml file inside your main module and insert this

If you don’t want to use CI/CD and just hardcode your DSN, replace ${sentryDsnUrl} with your collected DSN link.

Open app’s build.gradle and setup DSN there as well

Add Sentry gradle plugin to project

This code enables sentry gradle plugin. This prepares scripts for your convenience like uploading aab to sentry with proguard mapping files.

Nice things to know

Assign someone to new issue

Every issue in Sentry can be assigned to someone and you can do that manually or automatically with rules.

Create Jira issue directly from Sentry

If you setup the Jira integration mentioned in the previous article, Sentry enables you to quickly and easily create Jira issues from the issue itself.

Discover page

Discover page let’s you quickly query in all yours collected data so you can answer analytics questions or analyse potential health issues in your project. You can use predefined queries or create, edit and delete your own queries. It’s really powerful tool but it’s limited only to Trial and Business Plan.

Pluggins for Sentry

Sentry for Android offers plugins which let’s you automatically collect more specific data. For example:

Some stuff like Android Fragments, okHttp events and logcat are already logged automatically from Sentry version 3.1.0.

In order to disable them, change the sentry config in the project’s build.gradle.

OkHttp plugin

Like said above, from Sentry 3.1.0, Sentry will automatically log OkHttp event via manipulating your final bytecode and inserting SentryOkHttpInterceptor. This will create breadcrumbs which would look like this:

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If you use Sentry 3.11.0+, Sentry will also insert SentryOkHttpEventListener which will log even more data from http requests. Everything will be logged with logcat:

Thank you for diving into the second part of our series. If you have any questions, feel free to catch up or reach out.

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#meetcleevio

1 min read

From Code to Culture: The Backbone of Our Backend Team

Přemysl Rucký

Backend Lead

Hey there! Curious about what makes our backend team tick? Let me spill the beans on what keeps us running at Cleevio.

Team Contract: Our Secret Sauce

Ever heard of a team contract? It's like our BE team's rulebook but cooler. We all chipped in to create this gem, covering everything from our core values to nifty Slack etiquettes (like no-reply expectations after 4 PM). It's not just a newbie guide; even our weathered developers learn a thing or two from it.

Bringing the Team Together

With team members scattered across Prague, Brno, and beyond borders, building bonds ain't easy, but we're not ones to back down from a challenge. That's why we came up with Backend Onsite Day. Originally a monthly affair, we scaled it back to every two months to make it work for everyone. It's a chance to catch up, brainstorm, and maybe even grab a beer together.

Sharing Know-How Like a Boss

We take knowledge sharing seriously. Our weekly BE meetings aren't just about updates and project briefs - they are also our chance to pick each other's brains. Plus, we've got knowledge base packed with tech insights and project learnings. It's like having a cheat sheet for all things backend.

Reflect, Refine, Repeat

We're all about improvement. That's why we love our team retrospectives. Just recently, at the start of 2024, we huddled up for about an hour to chat about how things were going. Turns out, everyone is pretty happy being part of the team, which is great to hear - but we also came up with some ideas to make things even better next time. It's all about celebrating wins and figuring out how we can crush it even more in the future.

Growing Together

Personal growth is big on our agenda. Regular performance reviews and one-on-one chats keep us on track. And with internal training programs, education budgets, and buddy systems in place, we're all set to level up together.

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At the end of the day, it all comes down to communication. Whether it's a quick Slack chat or a face-to-face meeting, keeping the lines of communication open is what keeps our team humming.

So there you have it—our backend team's recipe for success. With a healthy dose of teamwork, communication, and a sprinkle of resilience, there's no limit to what we can achieve together at Cleevio.

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