Something of an outlier in this list of techniques is the survey; once you’ve used the various ethnographic approaches described elsewhere in this toolkit, surveys can feel like a very blunt tool - and the inability to be able to ask users questions about the answers they’ve given is very frustrating.
But surveys can have a role - often more a background one, either asking a wider group more general questions in order to inform the kinds of questions you’d ask as part of Semi-Structured Interviews, or taking the proposed design changes that came out of a UX project and trying to ascertain if there would be widespread support for making them. The other advantage of surveys is they allow for quantification and generalisation, whereas most other ethnographic tools that form the basis of UX research are qualitative in nature.
When constructing a survey try to make it short: people lose interest in long terms and their answers become less representative of their true views as they tire, and more about just reaching the end of the survey. We’d recommend using Google Forms to create the survey as the data is secure and easy to export into a spreadsheet for analysis. The other option for survey construction is Qualtrics. It’s worth noting that something like Survey Monkey is not supported by our IT Department and so wouldn’t be good to use for UX projects.