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User Experience Surveys: 10 Questions to Ask

User experience survey

74% of people are likely to return to a website if it is mobile optimized.

40% of people abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load.

User experience (UX) can make or break a brand identity. Fortunately, there are many steps you can take to understand your customers’ user experience better and rectify issues, if any.

In fact, companies can detect 85% of UX-related issues just by performing a usability test on a group of five users.

Apart from this, you can conduct regular user experience surveys to take the pulse of your software or website users.

But there’s a catch.

UX surveys are only as good as the questions you ask your participants.

To help you navigate this, I bring a list of 10 user experience surveys questions you should never forget to ask. But before we get to that, let’s understand the following.

What Are User Experience Surveys?

User experience surveys are surveys conducted to gauge the experience of a software product or website user. This is done through a set of well-selected user experience questionnaires directed to a client or target audience.

Such surveys are usually conducted just after you release a software solution or launch a website. Similarly, you may conduct these surveys as soon as you onboard a client onto your product.

Through a user experience survey, you can collect both quantitative and qualitative user data and gain insight into what they think about your product. It can throw light on their preferences, expectations, and pain points.

Also Read: Survey Question: 250+Examples, Types & Best Practices

How to Conduct UX Surveys

user experience lifecycle

Source: UXPA

The days of door-to-door surveys are now a thing of the past. So, whether you are conducting a user research survey or any other survey, the best way out is to take it online.

Online UX surveys are faster, more accurate, and convenient for both respondents and researchers.

There are many survey-making tools available today that you can leverage to plan, create, deliver, and analyze online surveys.

For example, you can use ProProfs Survey Maker to ask any question, any way you want. It comes with ready-to-use templates and questions. You’ll learn more about this platform below.

Points to Consider While Creating User Experience Surveys

Before you come up with your user experience survey questions, keep the following points in mind to get the best results with your user surveys.

1. Keep Questions Short and Simple

Asking no question is better than asking complicated and twisted questions. When the questions are short and easy, it helps your respondents to understand them readily. This will result in a higher response rate.

Examples:

Do you like our platform?

How would you rate our product’s ease of use?

2. Ask Neutral Questions

At times, putting words into your respondents’ mouths may backfire in the form of skipping questions and refusal to take a survey ever again. Never persuade them to express an opinion that they would otherwise not want to. Provide room for a diplomatic answer.

Examples:

We believe we offer the best customer service experience. How awesome do you think it is? (Wrong question) 

How helpful or unhelpful do you find our customer support? (Right question)

3. Keep the Surveys Transparent

To make your surveys meaningful, the survey reporting should be transparent. You should share the survey results with all stakeholders so that they are aware of what emerged from the survey.

Likewise, the respondents should know that you’ve implemented their inputs. All this will create a sense of trust in your business.

4. Respect Anonymity

Anonymous surveys are usually conducted on sensitive or controversial issues, such as workplace sexual harassment. By keeping the respondents’ identity anonymous, you protect their privacy and so you get more candid answers.

This means you get more accurate data as respondents feel free to share their honest opinions with you.

5. Let Users Skip Questions

Sometimes respondents find certain survey questions irrelevant or inapplicable to them, and they want to skip those questions. Here you can apply the skip logic. This feature lets you determine what question or page a respondent sees next based on their answer to the current question.

Allowing skipping in surveys presents a tailored approach to survey takers and keeps the questions short and relevant.

6. Ask One Thing at a Time

Focus on only one thing at a time in your surveys. Double-barreled questions tend to club more than one thing, which can be tricky for respondents to answer accurately. Such questions often include conjunctions, such as “or” and “and” to separate different items.

A better alternative is to break up the question into two separate ones since there’s no clear way to answer such a question.

Examples:

Do you exercise and drink lots of water daily? (Question to avoid)

Do you exercise daily? (Preferred)

How many glasses of water do you drink daily? (Preferred)

7. Check for Bias or Leading Questions

A biased, leading question is an unfair practice, and you should avoid it. Such questions are framed in such a way that they force respondents to answer in a specific manner.

In other words, instead of eliciting an unbiased and honest answer, researchers just want to validate a predefined answer. This will reflect inaccurately in survey results.

Examples:

How delightful is our customer service team? (You already assumed that it is delightful.)

What problems did you encounter with our newly launched website? (You already implied that there exists a problem.)

Read More: Tips to Avoid Leading and Loaded Questions

8. Use a Balanced Rating Scale

A balanced rating scale is essential in accurately determining the user experience and satisfaction with your product or service.

While a balanced rating scale will include an equal number of options for positive and negative responses, an unbalanced scale tilts towards more positive responses than negative.

Examples:

How easy is our product to use?

Very easy   Easy   Difficult   Very Difficult (Balanced scale)

Super easy  Easy  Average  Difficult (Unbalanced scale)

9. Focus on Time, Not on the Number of Questions

Remember, the more questions you ask in a survey, the less time your respondents spend on each question. This can compromise their understanding of questions and accuracy in results.

So, it makes sense to determine how much time a respondent will dedicate to each of your questions and fix the number of questions accordingly. This will ensure that they do justice to all the questions you pose. 

10. Structure the Survey

Depending on the online survey software you use, you can add some structure to your surveys. This can be in the form of layout and design, including questions per page, order of questions & answers, progress bar, and many more.

The idea is to make surveys visually appealing and easy for survey takers to navigate from one part to another.

11. Give a Way Out

Whether your survey respondents are done with a survey, want to save it, and leave, or exit the survey midway, you should provide a proper way out. For example, with ProProfs, you can choose to redirect your respondents to a particular webpage once the survey is over. Or else, you can show a customized completion page. This lets them wrap up a survey properly.

12. Show Progress

A progress bar is a common feature in online surveys. They inform respondents how fast or slow they are progressing while attempting a survey and how much time is left.

This can help ensure survey completion within a set time limit. Usually shown as a percentage, progress bars help eliminate anxiety in respondents by playing a constructive role in communicating their progress level.

Read More: Checklist for Creating an Effective Customer Survey

Let’s now jump to our main topic.

10 User Experience Survey Questions You Should Ask

The questions you can ask in a UX survey are endless. To make things easier for you, we’ve gathered 10 popular UX survey questions you should ask.

As a rule of thumb, the questions should cover all aspects of your customers’ experience with your product and service. Check out.

#1: How did you first come to know about our product?

This question can reveal a lot about the effectiveness of your marketing and advertising exercises. It can show you which channels are working to bring people to your doorstep and which areas you need to focus on.

You can identify whether most of your customers are coming from organic traffic, paid traffic, direct traffic, or referral traffic.

Tips: Based on the answers to this question, start targeting new visitors in places where they frequent so that you can capture leads.

#2 What was the first thing that came to your mind when you saw our product?

survey rating scale

Source: SlideModel

This is the best way to understand how users perceive your product. It will help you clearly identify what impresses them most with your product.

Tips: Let users put in a sentence or two about what they think the first time they see your product. This way, you can analyze the data better.

#3 Which of our competitors did you consider before choosing us?

User research survey questions like this can help you know your real competitors. This is significant since sometimes you may be surprised by who your users consider your competitor. It can add a new twist to how people see your brand.

Tips: Include this question in post-purchase UX surveys to know who you’re competing with, in the market.

#4 Why did you decide to choose us over our competitors?

This question will throw light on your USPs or advantages over some of your closest competitors. Users can choose you for a number of reasons. It can be the extensive features, competitive pricing, or exceptional customer service.

Once you know the “why” to it, you can easily understand how to attract more customers using those features.

Tips: Use this question in post-purchase user experience surveys. You can even ask this question to your existing customers.

#5 What do you like most about our product?

If you want to find out what it is about your product that makes your users delighted, you should ask this question. It can help you work further on improving the features that they find truly significant.

Tips: The end goal of such questions should be to upgrade your product or website for a seamless user experience. Let your users freely express in a few words what they think it is that helps them most.

#6 What do you least like about our product?

Similar to the above question, this question can shed light on your weakest or most vulnerable product feature. This will enable you to course-correct the existing problem before it aggravates.

Tips: You may pose this question to both first-timers and long-standing customers. Request them to pinpoint the nature of the problem and seek suggestions on how they think it can be corrected.

#7 How user-friendly is our product?

The usability of a software product is the number one consideration for customers. So, it is necessary to know how your product fares in this area. You can offer various choices for the response, ranging from “Very Easy” to“Very Difficult”.

Tips: Provide balanced options for response, positive and negative combined. Also, you may preferably add a “Why” in case of a negative response to identify the reason behind it.

#8 Which features do you find most helpful?

You already know the top features of your product, but it is also possible that your customers are focusing on some other features that you take for granted. This question can help you rethink everything and start concentrating on the features that your users find important.

Tips: Target your existing users who are already using those features for some time to meet their specific requirements.

#9 Which features do you find least helpful?

Equally important is identifying the features that your users find to be of little help. You can then fix them to increase their value while concentrating on those that your users really need.

Tips: Here also, you may target your existing user base.

#10 How likely are you to recommend our product to a friend or colleague?

This question sums up all the likes and dislikes and the values users attached to your product. A willingness to recommend a product to others is a clear sign of customer satisfaction.

If they don’t feel like recommending it to others, it indicates disappointment on their part. This makes it one of the most important questions on the list.

Tips: Target your regular visitors as well as the existing customers. In case of negative responses, ask “why not?” to extract more detail.

How to Analyze UX Survey Results

Formulating user experience feedback questions the right way is important, but that’s just one part of the task. The next big thing to consider is how to analyze your survey results.

Here are some ways you can perform the task efficiently and effectively.

1. Choose the Right Tool

Proprofs Survey Maker

There are many survey data analysis tools available to help you analyze the survey results. They are helpful, particularly when you’re analyzing a large amount of data. Online solutions like this can be the right choice in such situations since performing the task manually is just out of the question.

Also, some of the top-rated survey-making tools support reports & analytics. For example, ProProfs Survey Maker provides actionable insights into survey results with advanced reports and intelligent analytics.

You can easily see who took your survey and when, how they responded, and more. By reviewing this data, you can understand your users better and offer the best experiences in the future.

Not only that, you can even integrate Survey Maker with CRMs and marketing automation software. This way, you get the benefits of two or more tools in just one.

2. Compare With Past Data

It always helps to quickly compare your current survey results with those from the recent past. This will show you whether there has been an improvement or otherwise in your product’s user experience.

This will add meaning to your data, which would otherwise have remained just numbers.

For example, in the latest survey, if 54% of respondents said they are happy with your product, you can compare that figure with the previous year’s data. This will show if things are getting better or worse.

You can conduct data comparison monthly, quarterly, or annually. After each comparison, you may share it with your stakeholders for collective decision-making.

3. Use Cross Tabulation

If you put all the survey data in one section, you’ll find it difficult to analyze them and arrive at an accurate result. For example, if you club responses from your target customers with those who are not your ideal customers, it can show skewed results.

That’s why you should split the data into different categories. In this task, cross-tabulation can help you.
The arrangement of data can be according to different question types, demographics, negative/positive responses, or any other parameter.

All this will give you more clear-cut and actionable data.

4. Focus on Quantitative Data

There’s no doubt that qualitative data plays its part in UX surveys, but since they are generally subjective and intangible, they are not easy to quantify and analyze. So your primary focus should be on the quantitative data, the hard facts.

Quantitative data is often a result of closed questions, and hence they are definite and provide numerical value.

You can also understand qualitative data by first analyzing the quantitative data. For example, if 70% of users say they’re not happy using your product, you can focus on the negative responses.

This can help you gain insight into all the things that didn’t work out in their journey.

Ready for Your User Experience Surveys?

With these best practices, how-to’s, and insightful questions, your user experience surveys can never go wrong. The idea is to ask the right questions, the right way, to the right people. Along with this, a perfect analysis of survey results can give you valuable information on the user experience.

In this task, ProProfs Survey Maker can be your right-hand man. It is a SaaS survey software you can use to create, share, and track all kinds of surveys.

The tool comes with professionally designed templates and a variety of question types. People of all skill levels find it simple to use. So, it’s easy to get started with surveying. Take a quick tour of the product. Schedule a personalized demo.

Do you want a free Survey Software?

We have the #1 Online Survey Maker Software to get actionable user insights.

About the author

Jared is a customer support expert. He has been published in CrazyEgg, Foundr, and CXL. As a customer support executive at ProProfs, he has been instrumental in developing a complete customer support system that more than doubled customer satisfaction. You can connect and engage with Jared on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.