Surveys

A survey is an at-distance method of gathering information and views from a sample of people.

This is something of an outlier in this list of techniques; 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.

In a UX context there are two main occasions on which to use a survey. The first is to establish wider views on a subject before using more focused techniques such as semi-structured interviews to drill down into these in more detail. For example, you might run a survey on students’ attitudes to your building / spaces, to help you understand which themes to ask participants about in the one-to-one ethnography. 

The second UX-related instance to use a survey would be to test attitudes to potential design changes after the ethnography has been undertaken. For example your ethnography may have identified a problem with one of your services impacting negatively on the student experiences, and the design process may have come up with three possible solutions to the problem. A survey could help establish which of these solutions is most appealing to the students.

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.) The Skills Guide contains a comparison of Google Forms versus Qualtrics.

As well as the tools to construct and analyse the survey, you also need a means to distribute it - usually via email, social media, or by conducting the survey face to face with participants.

Think about the aim of the survey and construct clear questions which will help you achieve this. Ask as few questions as you can; when constructing a survey try to make it short as 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). Test your survey out yourself and ideally on a colleague before sending it out to the intended audience, and most importantly of all, schedule the time you need to analyse the results and come up with recommendations. 

There are more tips on survey construction on the Skills Guide.