Does your product help your customers do what they set out to achieve? Does it help them get things done or achieve the results they're after? And most importantly, does it live up to their expectations of function and use?
If you’re not sure about the answers to those questions, it might be time to send out a product usability survey.
With product usability surveys, you can gather direct feedback from your users about how your product is performing and how it can be better. They’re a valuable tool for learning about your customers and gaining actionable insights into your product experience. Read ahead to learn how to improve product usability with surveys.
Understanding the user experience
Providing customers with a product that meets their needs and helps achieve their goals, product teams must pay attention to the user experience (UX). Understanding your users’ behaviors, wants, and pain points is essential for good UX design.
Thankfully, there is a tool for gathering that data directly and efficiently — in-product surveys.
Find and solve product issues proactively
When used correctly, in-product surveys capture your users’ thoughts about your product in real-time. You can uncover time-sensitive issues, like serious product issues and bugs, and solve them before they impact product usability metrics.
If you’re launching a new feature in your product, you may trigger an in-product survey to pop up while your users are interacting with it. Find out what you’re doing well and what needs improvement — and craft a plan of action right away.
Meet (and exceed) user expectations
Surveys are more than just helpful tools for identifying pain points and bugs. They can also teach you how your users behave and what they expect from your product.
Say you receive 500 responses to a survey. You notice that 200 users mentioned frustration with a specific feature. It doesn’t seem to be a bug, but the feature needs attention.
This survey helped you discover a pattern in user behavior that you may not have noticed if you hadn’t asked. It’s impacted your course of action going forward and informed the next phase of your product strategy.
Crafting effective online surveys
What makes a survey effective and well-designed? Make sure that your surveys are:
- Short. People are busy, and attention spans are fleeting. Your average customer can spare you less than a minute to answer a survey — maybe even seconds.
- Easy to read. Likewise, your survey should be easy to read at a glance. Keep questions concise and make answers intuitive.
- Targeting the right users. Write questions for a defined, specific audience, and you’ll get more useful data from their responses.
- Sent at the right time. Timing is key for effective in-product surveys. You want to capture the user when your product is still on their mind.
Good survey design is just the start. If your survey is quick and easy to answer, you increase your chances of having it answered. However, the content of your survey is even more important.
Get better user feedback with clear, concise questions
Remember, you have very little time to catch a user’s attention and entice them to answer your survey. Keep survey questions straightforward, clear, and brief.
The following examples are effective open-ended questions:
- Which features are most valuable to you?
- What is your goal for using our product?
- How can we improve our product to meet your needs?
The following examples can be formatted as “yes/no,” rating scale, or multiple choice:
- Did you find what you were looking for?
- How satisfied are you with [insert feature?]
- How likely are you to recommend this product to others?
For more inspiration on what to include in your next survey, browse through the top product survey questions for 2024.
Use neutral language
The words you choose in your survey questions will make an impression on your users. You want your survey questions to be short, skimmable, straightforward, and neutral.
Here are some tips for using unbiased, neutral language in your survey questions:
- Avoid leading questions. Leading questions imply an opinion or bias. “Do you agree that our feature improves your experience?” is a leading question. You might change it to, “What do you think about this feature?”
- Avoid confusing wording. If you ask, “How often do you use our product?” and leave it open-ended, your users may not know how to answer. Daily? Weekly? Monthly? Change the wording or make it a multiple-choice question for better clarity.
- Avoid loaded terms. Words like “love,” “hate,” “amazing,” or “terrible” are loaded if used in surveys. Instead, ask your users how they would describe your product or how they feel about it. Stay neutral.
If you write biased survey questions (even unintentionally), the results will be skewed and unreliable. Write neutrally worded questions to get better survey data.
Pay attention to the format of your questions
You might hear that open-ended questions are the “best” type of questions to ask in your product surveys. They are valuable, but there are other question formats you can leverage to gather the data you want.
A simple “yes/no” question, for example, gives you an overall glimpse of customer satisfaction. A one-to-five rating scale paints a similar picture, with more quantitative data to help you understand how your product is performing. Multiple-choice questions can help you narrow down pre-selected data or test theories about how your customers will respond.
Using surveys without disrupting user engagement
Now that you’ve crafted your survey questions, when should you deploy your in-product surveys? More specifically, how do you trigger surveys without disrupting your users?
Sprig allows you to trigger an in-product survey based on two pieces of information:
- Who the user is
- What actions they take in your product
How do you avoid the risk of users ignoring your survey? Make your survey relevant. Ask the right question at the right time. For example, ask a new user how they feel about the onboarding process after completing a specific step or after they’ve finished the full process.
As for how often to ask questions, that depends on your goals, your users, and your product. However, Sprig has built-in methods that prevent your users from being overwhelmed with surveys, including best practices around how often to ask a question. With Sprig, you’ll never send one user the same study twice. You can also determine how often the same user sees different studies by setting a recontact waiting period. A month (30 days) is a good starting point that helps you gather user data but also prevents over-contacting users.
Analyzing survey data to measure user satisfaction
You’re ready to analyze your survey responses, measure user satisfaction, and begin improving your product usability. But you may not be sure where to start, or which metrics to look at.
The good news is, you already have a starting point for evaluating your user feedback. The survey questions you choose, your targeted users, and the actions that trigger your surveys tell you what you want to know.
If you want to measure customer loyalty and enthusiasm for your product, you might’ve used NPS (Net Promoter Score) for your in-product surveys. The scores ranging from 0 to 10 tell you whether users would recommend your product to others, and it’s easy to benchmark against averages.
Additionally, qualitative data is just as useful as quantitative data. Open-ended questions are worth analyzing for in-depth insights. However, based on the number of survey responses you get, manually analyzing your data is too time-consuming and tedious. You need efficient, quick techniques for evaluating your survey data that give you answers and insights fast.
Sprig’s AI Analysis gathers the results of your in-product surveys for you and handles the analysis. Sprig will uncover patterns, organize data, and offer actionable takeaways from the responses it reads.
Implementing changes based on feedback analysis
Once Sprig AI has offered key takeaways and actionable insights based on your survey data, it’s up to you to implement changes. Your path has already been outlined — what steps will you take next?
A clear product strategy set from the beginning should guide your next move. Think of your product strategy as a North Star. Any actions you want to take based on your survey results should fall in line with your product strategy, not disrupt it.
Also, remember that improving product usability is an iterative process. It’s not a one-and-done deal. You should continuously improve your product, ask for feedback, and implement changes based on feedback analysis. Once the cycle ends, it begins again.
People change; your users will, too. Their needs, and the way your product fits into their workflow, may evolve. Keep your product up to speed with ongoing product optimization (and by using surveys).
How ClassPass used visitor feedback to optimize their user journey
ClassPass is a leading subscription service for boutique gyms, fitness studios, and wellness services. As their partner business inventory grew rapidly, the ClassPass team knew they needed to improve to keep up.
ClassPass used Sprig in-product surveys to capture insights as their users engaged with their app search experience, a feature that needed updating. They measured user satisfaction with the current search filtering options and asked for ideas for improvement.
The responses poured in. Thanks to Sprig AI, the ClassPass team found that users wanted different search filtering options and the ability to filter for more than one category.
Based on these requests, ClassPass released new features and saw a 16% increase in the app’s usability rating.
Improve customer experience with strategic, consistent surveys
With well-timed and well-designed surveys, you can improve product usability and provide a better customer experience. Leverage in-product surveys to solve pain points, drive product innovation, and meet your users’ needs.
Sprig does the heavy lifting for you with in-product surveys that can be deployed in minutes. Use an expert-made template to send a survey, or customize one of your own with text and question format. Once responses roll in, Sprig AI Analysis takes care of the rest. You’ll get responses and insights in real time, plus patterns and key takeaways.
Ready to start surveying? Create your Sprig account today.