Role - Sr. UX Designer
Tools - Sketch
Technical Story
As a company I want to more quickly and easily survey users so that we can more consistently receive feedback without being obtrusive to the user.
The Problem
Spiceworks had tried several ways to garner feedback from users across a broad range of topics. Common tactics were to use links to separate pages with length surveys or multi-question surveys with at least a handful of potential answers per question that would be shown in asides or ad space. These surveys were interruptive and would often have issues with abandonment. Leadership needed a way to quickly and easily receive feedback from users without disrupting their engagement with the community and tools.
The Solution
When researching best practices to improve surveys we found consistently that they should be short and direct. SurveyMonkey shows that shorter surveys lead to higher completion rates and more thoughtful responses. We designed a simple survey with a minimal footprint and educated stakeholders on best practices and specific usage guidelines so that they were better informed when making decisions on when to use the mini survey to gather feedback and data.
Spiceworks has a very close relationship with its' community members so we chose to go with a more empathetic and personal tone in our communication. We understand that our users are busy and we want to be cognizant of the time they have and the reality that they are helping us directly when giving us feedback.
Some of the usage guidelines we devised to help better inform our stakeholders on best practices for this survey included limiting the number of questions and answers being asked to 5 or less, when to use certain types of inputs, how long questions should be, the tone of voice, and the stipulation that any multiple question survey would require a tracker to inform the user of their progress and let them navigate through the questions.
By creating a minimal design and set of guidelines to adhere to we were able to demonstrate the mini survey's flexibility across a range of use case scenarios be they progressive profiling, feature discovery, product rating, or even helping to drive growth for a new user segment within the community.