May I Take A Moment Of Your Time?

I believe users should be involved in the entirety of the product process – conception, hypotheses, flow, wire-framing, ui and implementation. I believe product management should talk directly to users. I believe the best way of talking to users is to have in-person one-on-one conversations. Unfortunately, this post is not about in-person interviews.

I’m talking about surveys today. Surveys are are great way to get a mass amount of data from your potential user-base. As opposed to behavioral data captured in interviews, they capture what users think. Benefits include:

• Confirming assumptions about your user-base
• Acquiring user pains and valuable opinions you may not have been privy to
• Validating whether this type of user is even interested in the product you’re offering
• Gathering insight which leads to improved questions for better surveys and interviews – wooooooo! (It is a vicious cycle though)

I hypothesized that the Subject Matter Expert Planner would be my Early Adopter and would help launch Share My Spots. To quickly gain some data on these users, I reached out to a few friends who fit the profile. Each person I shared the survey with was on a varying degree of how much they fit into that persona. Some, I thought, may have even fit into Recommendation Focused Traveler. The Travel Influencer, I felt, needed their own targeted survey focusing not only on the app but also how it would affect their profession.

There are several great survey services available – some free and some not so free. For this exercise, I chose Google Forms. In addition to being effective, the setup was fairly easy.

This initial survey is my gut check. My goals were:

• Keep it light. Don’t burden these lovely individuals that take time out of their day to answer my questions.
  • Communicate why you are asking them for this information and what it would be used for.
• Sprinkle in some demographics.
• Focus on pain points and be open to the fact that I may not be aware of all the pains they experience
• Innocently throw in a question that speaks to monetization. (How can I can make money off of this application without being a d*ck about it.)

Some final thoughts when creating your survey questions:

• Don’t ask leading questions.
• Don’t make assumptions.
• Do some research when formulating demographic questions.
• Don’t overthink it. You won’t get all the information you need from one stupid survey. It’s better to send out a bad survey, get feedback and revise than fretting over the “perfect” survey for weeks.