The overall quality of the user experience is one of the most important factors contributing to the success, or total failure, of your website. No matter how flashy and attractive it is; if it’s too convoluted and hard to navigate, your visitors will leave and never return.
As a website owner or creator, you know it’s necessary to offer stellar user experience. You want the website to look good, work smoothly on all devices and drive visitors in. But that's easier said than done.
No matter how hard you try to perfect your website, all your efforts will be wasted unless you don’t confront your ideas with the potential users. For you, things are obvious. After hours of looking at and perfecting your website, you know it all. And that’s exactly why you are likely to overlook problems that new visitors may face right from the get-go.
Fortunately, there are many different methods to determine how easy and intuitive it is for your visitors to assess your website’s UX. One of the most popular is conducting an online experience survey.
Advantages of Online Surveys
Let’s start with the basics; an online survey is a questionnaire that your target audience completes over the internet, usually by filling out a form. What are the benefits of using it in the assessment of your website? Join me to find out.
Fast
There’s nothing more annoying than the feeling of wasting time; both on the side of the researcher, as well as the user. By running online surveys, you can save your respondents some effort, as the time span needed to complete an online survey project is on average two-thirds shorter than that of traditional research methods. And don’t even get me started on how easy it is to collect the results of the survey! With no paper questionnaires scattered around and almost instant response time, you can analyse the results in the twinkling of an eye.
Accurate
One moment of carelessness, one slip of your finger, and boom, there’s a mistake in your results. When a researcher performs a repetitive task, such as entering results into the database, human error can easily creep in. With online surveys, the margin for error is greatly reduced as the responses go directly to your system.
Quick to analyse
As I mentioned before, once your respondent answers the questions, they’re waiting for you in the database, ready to be analysed. Having that comfort, you can go straight to action with the collected data.
Easy to use
We’re all so used to managing our matters remotely! Even though some issues still require our physical presence, this is not the case with surveys. With an online survey, participants can pick a moment that suits them best and they can do it from the comfort of their own home.
Cheap
Running online questionnaires reduces your expenses to a bare minimum. There’s no need to allocate resources and time to collect the results and enter it into your database, as the responses are processed automatically. There are also many free survey tools available.
Easy to style
It’s always a good idea to plug some self-promotion! Conducting an online survey is a great opportunity to use your branding to make the respondent remember your company. A web survey can be styled to match your business website with customised backgrounds, images, logos, and fonts.
Honest
It has been found that participants prefer to complete online surveys rather than take part in written questionnaires or telephone interviews. Moreover, they are usually more likely to provide longer and more detailed answers. By designing and sending relevant and targeted surveys, people are more likely to give honest answers.
Flexible
The order of questions in an online survey can be changed and your respondents can skip some of them, depending on their answers. This way, a survey can be personalised to each participants’ choices as they proceed.
A Quick Guide on How to Create Online Surveys
Have I managed to convince you that conducting an online survey is a good idea? Great, then let’s discuss some of the best practices to perfect your online surveys.
Define the goal of your survey
First of all, you need to ask yourself a very important question: what kind of information do you want to get from your respondents? Once you decide what’s the goal of your survey, focus on creating questions related to the main topic. Remember that each survey must have one visible purpose, as there’s no use in trying to solve too many things at once.
Define your target audience
There’s no use in sending your survey around to random people. Before you spring into action, focus on defining your target audience. Ask yourself what kind of people are most likely to use your website and create a persona accordingly. By doing so you can be sure that the data you collect will provide you with valuable insights.
Don’t write too many questions
It’s very tempting to ply your respondents with questions. However, I advise you to keep yourself from doing so. Instead of asking numerous repetitive questions, try to create only a few but very precise ones. By doing so you are likely to keep your respondents interested and consequently, get more valuable information. It’s also a good idea to organise your questions into a logical flow to make the process even easier.
Test your survey
Before subjecting your respondents to your survey, it’s advisable to test your survey. Ask a few people to answer the questions to make sure that they’re understandable. By doing so, you can also find any technical issues.
Your success is just a survey away
Online surveys can provide you with valuable insights into what works, and what doesn’t, on your website. They are less time consuming, they are cheaper, you get the results faster, and you can transfer and use the data in various applications to answer important questions. All the good stuff!
What are you waiting for? Let’s assess your website with an online survey!
