It’s one thing to design a product you feel good about. It’s another to know for certain that you’re providing a great product experience. The catch is that, in all likelihood, you’re too close to your product to really know whether your users are enjoying it.
Many different types of surveys can help you figure out what’s going wrong within your PX, but in-product surveys are the clear winner. Here’s a guide to how in-product surveys work and how to design them for the most meaningful insights possible.
What Are In-Product Surveys?
In-product surveys are super short questionnaires that appear right within your app. They pop up right while someone uses your platform so that you get powerful PX feedback in real time.
Sprig’s In-product Surveys allow product managers and researchers to target surveys at specific points in the user journey.
When you design your survey well, you’ll get especially meaningful results from people who actually use your platform. That’s why companies ranging from ClassPass to Codecademy have used Sprig’s In-product Surveys to identify pain points and make game-changing improvements.
How to Build the Best Survey
The best way to build an in-product survey depends on the goals you’re looking to achieve. Sprig’s survey templates empower you to quickly create and distribute questions that are just as quick for users to answer. Below are just a few examples of these templates and how they help you write and ask the right in-product survey questions.
- Getting Actionable Feedback for UX Improvements
When the crypto app Coinbase revised its tax center, it needed to know why users were visiting the tax center in the first place. The Coinbase team launched an In-product Survey that started with a rating-scale question, then a multiple-choice single-select question, and finally an open-text question. These questions were:
- How satisfied are you with the product interface? (One-to-five rating scale)
- Did you find what you were looking for in the product interface? (Yes or no question)
- What are you looking for? (Open-text question)
Through these questions, Coinbase caught and fixed a bug that blocked users’ tax report downloads while improving the tax center’s PX.
- Measuring Customer Effort and Minimizing Onboarding Drop-Offs
When Invoice2Go expanded from invoicing services to a full-service solution with banking capabilities, the team noticed much less activity than expected after new user signup. The team built an in-product survey to target users who applied for Invoice2Go’s new card system and received approval but never started using the service. The questions in this survey were:
- How easy or difficult was the application process for you? (Multiple-choice single-select)
- We noticed that you haven’t linked your bank account yet. What is the reason for that? (Multiple-choice single-select)
- What could be improved to make it easier to apply? (Open text)
Through Sprig’s In-product Surveys, Invoice2Go revised its PX, lowered user drop-offs, and increased usage by 25%.
- Understanding Users’ Expectations and Driving Engagement
Noon Academy was unsure whether its new peer-based study groups were benefiting its students. Before the Noon team changed the app’s PX, it needed to figure out why people were or weren’t using the peer-to-peer tools. The team asked these questions to figure out how it could make the study groups more effective.
- What were you looking for when you came to Noon? (Multiple-choice single-select)
- What aspects about it work for you? (Multiple-choice single-select)
- Are you still actively using Noon? (Multiple-choice single-select)
- How would you rate the current version of Noon? (One-to-five rating scale)
- Can you share the reason behind your rating? (Open text)
Noon’s survey question uncovered bugs with simple fixes and uncovered ways to give students more direction while participating in peer-based groups.
How To Design Effective Surveys
A great in-product survey:
- Is super short. All the real-world surveys above take roughly a minute to complete. You could probably get through the entire Coinbase survey in just 20 seconds. Assume that your average user is busy and only has so much time to answer questions — make it easy for them.
- Targets only some users. Coinbase surveyed tax center users, Noon Academy asked questions of students in peer study groups, and Invoice2Go sought feedback from new users. In each case, the survey targeted only one group of users within the app’s audience. Follow this example in your own surveys — writing questions for a narrow, defined audience comes more naturally and yields more useful data.
Analyzing Survey Data: AI vs. Manual Analysis
In the old days, once you were done running a survey, you’d download all your data as a spreadsheet and review it manually. Sprig’s AI Analysis, powered by GPT, automatically reviews your survey data to pinpoint themes and make recommendations. You’ll get a detailed snapshot of all your users’ needs to save invaluable time on deciding which product features are worth prioritizing. You’ll also learn about growing trends in user behavior so you can make fixes before your numbers take a hit for the worse.
Sprig AI removes manual work while generating real-time updates. Sprig generates new insights right as your latest survey answers arrive. It’s the most efficient way to transform your users’ wants and needs into clear next steps for your team.
Conduct In-Product Surveys With Sprig
Through in-product surveys, user journey replay clips, and AI analysis, Sprig goes beyond customer analytics. You’ll directly ask users how they feel and what they need directly within your product, then use their answers to solve corresponding problems. Sprig uncovers the reasons behind churn, poor feature adoption, and everything in between while identifying clear avenues for improvement.
Use Sprig’s nearly 100 expert-made templates for advanced targeting, and integrate Sprig with Census, Segment, Mixpanel, and Amplitude for seamless data flow. Set up dashboards for each of your user journeys to run AI Analysis in one place. Getting started is easy — and so too is getting powerful insights for the long haul.