From the course: Surveys and Questionnaires for UX Projects

What surveys are good at telling you

From the course: Surveys and Questionnaires for UX Projects

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What surveys are good at telling you

- If you run a set of interviews or focus groups, you have to find the similarities and differences between the words that each participant uses, in order to work out where they agree and where they disagree on certain topics. Questionnaires make that process much easier by constraining the types of answers they can give. Different question types let your respondents choose one or more options from a list of answers, indicate where they fall on the scale of responses, or enter factual information, such as dates, times, numbers and other details. Because people are responding to predetermined options, surveys generate numerical data that's much easier and faster to analyze than a stack of interview transcripts. Of course, there's still the option to let people respond with words as well. Surveys can give you fast answers to your questions, especially when you don't have direct access to users who you can preserve or interview. They're good for measuring changes over time. You can run a survey to create a benchmark set of satisfaction or other data, then run the same survey later after you've made changes to your processes, product or services, and compare the results to show improvements. Surveys can be cheaper to administer per participant than other research techniques. That also allows you to collect larger sample sizes, which can give you additional confidence in the results. To create a good survey, it's important to recognize and remove any biases you bring to the process. We'll cover biases in terminology, participant recruiting and question types as we go through this course. Another issue with surveys, is that it's always tempting to try and use them to see into the future. By that, I mean asking respondents what they might do in the future, rather than focusing on what they have done in the past. Because what people say differs greatly from what they actually do, any method where you aren't recording direct or indirect user behavior might well lead you astray. Believing the answers that people give you to speculative questions is only going to get you into trouble. But questions that focus on actual past and current behaviors can give you great insight into what's happening today. Just like any other research technique, surveys are only going to give you data that's as good as the planning you put into them. You need to have clear goals for what you want to learn and who you want to learn it from. But with the right set up and attention to detail, surveys can give you great insights into the behaviors and views of the people you care about.

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