How to create effective, quality surveys using UX heuristics and principles

How we can use UX principles to improve survey performance metrics

To people who have not studied survey writing, it can seem like a very simple process. You ask a question and you get the responses. However there are a lot of factors to consider in order to ensure you are getting reliable, valuable insights. The format of a survey study has a significant impact on the overall likelihood of participants wanting to, and getting round to completing it, as well as the accuracy to the answers they provide. Below I explore how to make a survey more enjoyable based on my own experience conducting and taking them, and how applying UX principles and heuristics to survey writing can aid with the completion rate and lower drop out rate. These principles include those from the God Fathers of UX; Jakob Nielsen’s [1], Alan Cooper [2], and Steve Krug [3].

Before getting started, it is important to note some of the fundamentals of writing a survey. A course I took by the University of Michigan called ‘UX Research at Scale: Surveys, Analytics, Online Testing’ [4] was a very useful overview of how to write one, exploring some of the key things to consider when writing one including:

• Value exchange — what the user gets in return for their time and answers
• Open ended vs close ended questions
• Context setting
• The anatomy of a survey (question stem, additional instructions + space for answer)
• Defining the population (sample)
• Survey Mode
• Nominal vs ordinal
• Biases

I would recommend that course for anyone interesting in learning more about those topics, but for this content I will explore the UX principles and heuristics that can be applied to survey writing.

Visibility of system status

Providing users with continuance feedback on where they are in a process, and how much is remaining is one of the core parts of any experience. This allows users to make an individual assessment on whether they have the time to do something, and to mentally prepare themselves for what needs to be done. The same applies…