Customer feedback, survey recruitment, video website testing, and Google Analytics solutions for small businesses, startups, growth hackers, and academics
I’m pleased to announce that by popular demand, I have added in both website reviews, as well as cross-device testing.
I can review your websites across PC, Mac, iOS, iPAD, Android & Windows Phone.
I can also also do cross-browser reviewing, on Chrome, Firefox, IE, Edge, Safari, and more.
For more information, or to place an order, check out my Video Website Reviews page.
Website polling is a great source of user insight. It allows you to get quick hit feedback about people’s experience when they’re on your site.
Tools like Hotjar, Lucky Orange, or SurveyMonkey allow you to deploy on site polls (with many of these services offering more sophisticated heatmapping and video recording services).
It’s best to select different questions for different pages.
In general, you’ll want to target your highest traffic pages, as otherwise you won’t get enough traffic to get enough responses to be meaningful.
You can set your polls to go off after a short interval (like 5 seconds), or when the user is about to leave the pages.
The latter would be best to use, for example, in the checkout process – where you wouldn’t want to interrupt them during the process – but would like to collect feedback as to what went wrong on a defection from the process.
If you’re testing people in the wild, with a website polling service like Hotjar, you can solicit feedback as it happens on the site with questions like this:
The key here is to be as personable and not annoying as possible. This means simplification, and asking things as casually and in as simple “human speak” as possible.
In general, you will want to prefer open-ended, or comment questions, as you can get deeper, more descriptive feedback this way.
After all, what’s more actionable – a question like, “on a scale of 1-5, how much did you like the site experience?” as compared to “what would you do to improve the experience of the checkout process?” In the latter, you can group into themes and prioritize fixes and optimizations. In the former, not so much.
Well that’s it for this episode of quick hit awesome. Check in next time when we’ll get into a comparison of my favorite website feedback technologies in the market today.
This August, in honor of customer feedback and free stuff, I will have 500 test your website and give you their opinion of it, for FREE.
This is a $250 value.
For more information about what is entailed in the gig itself, please visit my Fiverr website test page.
The best part is that for every person you share this contest with, you will receive 10 additional entries, and there is no limit on how many entries you can earn!
Good luck and please let me know below if you have any questions!
Greetings Earthling, it’s time for another glorious installment of “pretty awesome questions you can ask people.”
In this edition, we’ll be turning our gaze to the ULTIMATE usability question you can ask yer peeps.
First… right off the bat, there’s three types of individuals you should always think about recruiting to test your website:
1) The Expert. Hire a UX (usability) expert to deconstruct or “tear down” your website, looking for conversion obstacles based on “best practices,” and his infinite wisdom
2) The Average User. The average user is my favorite type of recruit, because they don’t know about your business at all. You should always keep this visitor type in mind when you’re designing your site.
3) The In Betweener. Between the expert and the LCD is the individual who lives in your world, but doesn’t know much in terms of usability “best practices.” This generally is your target market and someone whose input will likely be invaluable to you.
As with any research, the tools and targets you use only give you a fragment of reality. So it’s probably best to recruit them all, to get different perspectives & inputs.
Now there’s lots of usability questions you can and should ask each of these types of individuals, but in my experience the one that always yields the best insight for all – and why I call it the ultimate usability question is:
Do you want to answer the ultimate usability question for greglinginsight.com? See results!
What’s great about this question is that it fits all the criteria of a truly awesome questions:
Adding the words “major or minor” is especially key as it takes a little pressure off the survey taker, and so the individual feels free to answer with something large and strategic, or could get down more in the weeds with something a little more actionable & tactical. You could get as feedback website bugs, small issues, big ideas, design, or anything really. And since it’s an open-ended question, you’ll get more useful, unexpected feedback than a simple multiple choice question would provide.
In my experience, having run hundreds if not thousands of these types of studies, it tends to yield the most interesting, and wide ranging insight.
So there it is. Why don’t you try asking it to your next visitor, or if you’d like, hire me to recruit people to do it for you, starting as low as only $5!
Surveys are great for quickly & inexpensively collecting customer feedback to help you rapidly iterate towards a minimum viable product. But like any research tool, there are some minefields you have to watch out for to make sure your results are actually useful.
The unfortunate fact of the matter is there’s no way to tell FOR SURE that the person taking your survey knows what you’re asking, or is just spacing out, checking things randomly and thinking about Doritos, or whatever.
These folks – whom I call, appropriately I think, “Dorito Munchers” – are people who whisk through your survey just checking boxes. This annoying, yet easy to weed out, creature we battle with in market research circles can easily torpedo the best planned out research study.
So aware of this threat, you can lay a trap in the form of an attention check – or what I call an “anti-Dorito muncher question” – to weed them out and keep your survey safe.
This question is a tricky little bugger designed solely to outfox the easily outfoxable.
The way it works is that you just need to lure them in with a simple statement, then create a mini “wall of text”paragraph and then at the end, ask a simple question, the answer of which is in fact wrong. If they were in fact paying any attention at all, they would know that the likely answer is wrong. And if they answer the likely (wrong) answer, then they show they’re not paying attention, and they get disqualified, and your survey remains untainted.
You don’t have to follow my example verbatim – in fact, I just made it up on the spot. But basically a well-crafted attention check question will have these 3 elements:
Now could argue that in fact the above question wouldn’t screen out every Dorito muncher, since as is said the clock is often right twice a day, and they could be so spaced out (and lucky) that they’d answerthat the sky is more likely to be orange correctly. So if you want to add some additional protection, then what you could do is structure the question so that instead of answering wrong, they shouldn’t answer at all. In other words, tell them to skip the question. This would minimize further anyone getting through the cracks.
Then, once you have your surveys collected and it comes time to analyze it, you could simply filter out those that answered the question in your survey results.
Advanced? Not really… but I like the title advanced anti-dorito muncher, so please forgive.
Anyway there you go…an amazing and nearly sure-fire way of protecting your survey from the unaware Dorito Munchers of the world. So until next time…go forth into the world of market research protected from Dorito Munchers…and be sure to practice safe surveying!
I work with a lot of clients from all walks of life, most of whom don’t have a formal background in market research, and I see a lot of common recurring errors in the surveys they write that can negatively impact their results and data quality.
So if you’re interested in writing your own survey (but why would you, when you could take advantage of my great survey editing services?), here are 3 common design errors to look out for (and recommended solutions) when creating your own:
Let’s say you’re a restaurant owner, and you want to find out what people might like you to include on your menu. So a logical choice might be to ask a question like this:
Seems like a reasonable enough question, right?
The only problem is that the respondent might in fact not like any of these dishes.
Yet – and especially if you’ve made these questions required – the respondent is forced into a troubling dilemma. How to proceed? Likely he or she will simply mark anything to proceed to the next question, and you as the researcher will be left unknowingly with an inaccurate response.
This is known as introducing survey bias.
The solution?
Make sure you always think through the question, “what if my respondent wouldn’t like any of these options?”
In this case, you need to ensure you have a “release valve” for those answers, and one of the best options you can use is, “none of the above.”
In this way, the respondent can more accurately respond with his or her interest, and you as the researcher will be left with more accurate responses.
I recently ran a poll where the individual asked a question about a name preference, and then proceeded to list out 35 different potential answers.
Clearly, the researcher was trying to whittle down a large bevy of options into a more manageable amount, but the problem is that the results could never really be trusted.
That’s because providing too many potential answers introduces another form of survey bias. After all, when there are so many responses, the survey taker is likely to get overwhelmed, and just select anything versus considering them all, which will reduce the reliability & accuracy of the results.
The solution?
Simple – don’t provide too many answer options. Edit down ruthlessly.
Is there a hard and fast rule of how many multiple choice answers to ask? No, but like with all things, try to take a critical look at your question through the eyes of your audience. Would the amount of answers in the question overwhelm you? If so, be ruthless in your editing, and see where you can cut out other options.
In the case of the naming poll, I would have preferred him to try to select his 4-6 favorite items, and then proceed with further iteration in future surveys.
As a corollary to the including too many answers, often I just get people asking too many questions with massively long surveys!
Again, the reasoning makes sense – the researcher wants to get as much insight as possible, so they’re going to ask as many questions as possible about a whole range of items on their mind.
However, again as before, your survey takers are human, and when you have a survey that just goes on and on, it’s likely that the respondent may start to lose focus or interest. Again, introducing survey bias.
Solutions?
Your survey isn’t Superman. It doesn’t have to do everything.
Whenever you first sit down to create a survey, you shouldn’t actually start writing questions. What you should do is answer the question, “What is the purpose of my running this survey at all?”
Your purpose should be focused. If you have a ton of things you’re hoping to get out of the survey, then consider breaking your survey into a few smaller, more focused surveys.
Additionally, always try to be as ruthless as possible in editing down and simplifying your survey creation. More is not necessarily better, and can often be worse. In general, the more efficient you can be in getting more information while asking less questions, the better.
Sometimes despite your best efforts you will need to field a longer survey, but in that case there are devices – like including progress bars or breadcrumbs – that can give the survey taker some context which will help with their motivation and focus.
In Conclusion (tl;dr)
Good survey design isn’t rocket science. It just comes down to being aware of a few simple general rules of thumb:
Follow these 3 simple rules and you’ll likely be miles ahead of other survey researchers and more importantly, receive more accurate & reliable data in your future surveys.