The effectiveness of surveys starts with the quality of the questions. Question writing is an art and a science. You need to balance your needs and the needs of the organization commissioning the survey with the burden on the respondents. Here’s a summary of 12 useful guidelines we use, pulled from books and articles. 1.
It’s fundamental to creating both a usable customer experience and a better business: you need to know who your customers are. It however can be surprisingly difficult for organizations to connect with their customers to collect information. But just because it isn’t easy doesn’t mean you should skip it. Collecting core demographic information and customer
An effective questionnaire is one that has been psychometrically validated. This primarily means the items are reliable (consistent) and valid (measuring what we intend to measure). So if we say a questionnaire measures perceptions of website usability, it should be able to differentiate between usable and unusable websites and do so consistently over time. With
In a usability evaluation it’s good practice to measure both how users perform on realistic tasks and what they think about the usability of the interface. But what exactly DO you ask the users? “Is this usable?” … “Is the interface easy to use?” … “Did you like using the app?” While you can cobble
There isn’t a usability thermometer to tell us how usable an interface is. We observe the effects and indicators of bad interactions then improve the design. There isn’t a single silver bullet technique or tool which will uncover all problems. Instead, practitioners are encouraged to use multiple techniques and triangulate to arrive at a more
There is a long tradition of including items in questionnaires that are phrased both positively and negatively. This website was easy to use. It was difficult to find what I needed on this website. The major reason for alternating item wording is to minimize extreme response bias and acquiescent bias. However, some recent research[pdf] Jim
Have you ever watched a user perform horribly during a usability test only to watch in amazement as they rate a task as very easy to use? I have, and as long as I’ve been conducting usability tests, I’ve heard of this contradictory behavior from other researchers. Such occurrences have led many to discount the
