And the Survey Said…

Surveys can be an excellent UX research tool to understand your customers and users. Like any research technique, they can be a huge help, or they can be misused or misunderstood. A few things worth noting about (online) surveys:

More survey data isn’t necessarily better. Think beforehand about what you will do with your answers before deciding what to ask.
Related to the above point, users won’t often fill out a lot of data anyways, so it is best to keep them short.
Surveys often work well after more qualitative techniques, like interviews or contextual inquiries.
If you are stuck deciding if you have a good survey question, do a semi-structured interview first to capture what customers and users talk about, then firm up those insights with a survey.
One way to remember this order of research is to always identify first and quantify second.
Like any UX research technique, you must be very wary of using them as your only data source for a business or design decision.

Scott Plewes

Chief Strategy Officer

Over the past twenty-five years, Scott has worked in the areas of business strategy, product design and development in the high tech sector with a specialization in experience design. He has extensive cross-sector expertise and experience working with clients in complex regulated industries such as aviation, telecom, health, and finance. His primary area of focus over the last several years has been in product and service strategy and the integration of multi-disciplinary teams and methods. Scott has a master's degree in Theoretical Physics from Queen's University.