Website Polling Basics

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).

Targeting

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.

Great questions to ask

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:

• Quick question – how can we make this page better?
• Where did you first hear about us?
• Why were you looking for (product) today?
• Quick question – what persuaded you to signup today?
• What are your main concerns or questions about (name)?
• If there’s one thing, major or minor, that we could do to improve the experience of this site, what would it be?

General rules of thumb

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.