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Optimizing Your Survey Data: When to Use Open-Ended or Close-Ended Questions
User Insights

Optimizing Your Survey Data: When to Use Open-Ended or Close-Ended Questions

Written by | Apr 24, 2024

April 24, 2024

Optimizing Your Survey Data: When to Use Open-Ended or Close-Ended Questions

Open-ended questions vs. close-ended questions: which one will deliver the right data to help you improve the product experience?

Both question formats help you collect valuable user data and measure customer satisfaction with your product. It’s how you use them that matters. Close-ended questions help you collect and interpret specific data quickly, while open-ended questions give you insights into your product that you may not have considered. 

Learn more about best practices for using open-ended questions and close-ended questions in your surveys.

Open-Ended vs Close-Ended Questions:

Open-ended questions don’t have a “yes” or a “no” answer. This interaction style lets survey respondents answer questions in free form, without limitations or preset options. 

Open-ended questions help foster dialogue between you and your users. The conversation tactics used to encourage your survey respondents to express their opinions, feelings, and experiences in their own words. This survey structure is incredibly useful for learning about your audience and improving your product.

Open-ended questions often include words like “what,” “how,” or “why.”

  • What are you trying to solve by using our product?
  • Which features are most valuable to you and why?
  • How can we improve our product?
  • What were your main reasons for choosing our product?
  • How would you describe your experience with us?
  • How can we help you?

Close-ended questions can only be resolved with a fixed set of predetermined answers. Because close-ended questions offer limited responses, data interpretation is efficient. You can narrow your focus to specific variables or features with close-ended questions, too.

“Yes” or “no” questions are common interrogative techniques used in close-ended questions. Other examples include multiple choice, Likert scale questions, true/false, or even thumbs up/thumbs down. 

  • Did you find the product you were looking for? 
  • Was your customer service experience satisfactory?
  • Would you use our product again?
  • On a scale of 1 to 10, how satisfied are you with our product?
  • How likely are you to recommend this product to others: very likely, likely, neutral, unlikely, very unlikely?
  • How did you hear about us? Google review, word of mouth, search engine, referred by someone, social media

Advantages and Challenges of Open-Ended Questions

Open-ended questions enable you to uncover valuable insights into your users that you might not expect. Open-ended questions provide key qualitative data, such as motivation for using your product or frustration with certain features.

Plus, open-ended questions are flexible. They can be used in every stage of your product roadmap. You might use open-ended questions to better understand your users’ needs in the early stages of product development. Or, get helpful customer feedback during beta testing before launch. Once you’ve gone live, open-ended questions can give you the data you need to improve your product experience.

However, answers to open-ended questions may take longer to collect and interpret. Your respondents need more time to answer open-ended questions in detail. You also have to understand the sentiment behind each reply for deeper insights. And once surveys are back in your hands, response evaluation may be time-consuming. You’ll need to organize data, look for recurring themes or patterns, and compare responses.

Sprig AI Analysis can handle all of that for you. Sprig AI lets you skip the manual analysis by automatically transforming your feedback into actionable insights. With Sprig AI, you can pull top takeaways from responses and pinpoint product opportunities or trends.   

Advantages and Challenges of Close-Ended Questions

Close-ended questions are helpful for gathering quantitative data that can be easily measured and summarized. Data gained from close-ended questions can help you evaluate features or make decisions more quickly than open-ended questions.

Close-ended questions can help you and your team measure specific, commonly used user experience metrics. Metrics like NPS (Net Promoter Score) or CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score) use close-ended questions to track user experience and customer happiness in general. If you want a quick overview of your product's performance, close-ended questions can help. 

However, because of their nature, close-ended questions limit how your users respond to your surveys. You may miss out on valuable data and insights that aren’t provided in your predetermined survey answers.   

You also must be careful when writing close-ended questions and their respective in your surveys. If your provided answers don’t match your users’ experiences or perspectives, you might unintentionally skew your data. If someone doesn’t see their answer in your list of options, they may choose the next best one, or decline to answer at all.

Best Practices for Using Both Inquiry Methods

Both open-ended questions and close-ended questions are valuable survey methodologies, but when should you use which survey structure? 

When to use close-ended questions

If you’re conducting a large-scale survey or you want to gather and analyze user data fast, close-ended questions are likely the better option. Respondents can answer your questions more quickly, and their replies are then easier and faster to analyze.

Let’s say you want to learn how users are finding your product and what’s encouraging them to sign up for a paid monthly subscription. Your top sources of traffic are social media, third-party reviews, and referrals/word-of-mouth. You might poll your users to get accurate numbers that can be plotted on graphs and used in charts. Then, you can see where most of your traffic is coming from and use that information to acquire more new customers.

When to use open-ended questions 

When you want detailed information to better understand your users or the sentiment behind their actions or opinions, use open-ended questions. This type of survey can help you contextualize quantitative data that close-ended questions have already provided.

Let’s say a Sprig in-product Survey found that a significant number of your users are frustrated or unsatisfied with one of your product features. Maybe a close-ended survey pointed out that pattern in your data, but you’re not sure why. Open-ended questions give you the opportunity to dig deeper into those users’ experiences.

Gain Valuable Insights Through Surveys With Sprig

Open-ended questions offer rich, detailed data about your customers’ experiences and opinions, while close-ended questions give you easily measurable, structured data. To get a comprehensive picture of your audience and product, use a combination of both question formats.

With Sprig, manual survey collection or time-consuming survey analysis is a thing of the past. Sprig takes care of every step with in-product Surveys, user journey Replays, and AI Analysis. Use Sprig to capture data, dig deeper into the user experience, and transform your findings into actionable insights.

Start surveying more efficiently with Sprig. Get started today.

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