My First User Survey: Crafting the Survey
By: Katy Wellington
Tags: UX Research, Wearables

Iteration 1:

The primary objective of this survey is to find out if there are any barriers that exist that keep the general public from using wearables. When beginning to create my first draft of my survey, I thought, “I’ve got this, I’m a teacher, I make tests and quizzes all the time, which are just like surveys!” I soon realized though that a user survey is very different than a quiz or a test I give my students.

In my first draft of this survey I had the following introduction and questions created in a Google Form:

Introduction-

Purpose: This is a quick survey to determine any barriers that may exist in keeping the public from using wearable technology.

There are no wrong answers.

Wearable Technology: Wearable technology, fashion technology, tech togs, or fashion electronics are smart electronic devices (electronic device with micro-controllers) that can be incorporated into clothing or worn on the body as implants or accessories.

Questions:

Do you use wearable technology? Yes/No (These answers lead to different questions based on conditional logic). If yes: What kind of wearable technology do you use? (This was followed by a list of possibilities in a “check all that apply” format with an “other” option as well.) If no Q1: Why have you chosen NOT to use a wearable device? (This was also followed by a list of possibilities in a “check all that apply” format with an “other” option as well.) If no Q2: What, if anything would persuade you to purchase wearable technology? (This was an open ended question with a paragraph format.)

5. What is your profession? (Fill in the blank)

6. What is your age? (Drop down menu with age brackets.)

7. What city and state do you live in? (Fill in the blank)

8. Would you be willing to be contacted with further questions? Yes/ No -If yes, it lead them to a space to leave their email address. If no, it lead them to submit the form.

Well that took me about ten minutes! Great!…Finished!… Right? I reviewed my questions and just did not feel like they were adequate in helping me find trends and real insights into any possible barriers to the general public using wearables. As a teacher, I teach my students how to write a CER scientific argument. In this type of writing, they have to create a claim, back that claim with evidence, and support how that evidence relates back to the claim with reasoning and analysis. I felt like my questions were missing the reasoning part; I just didn’t see how they were going to provide me with data that would link back to my original and ultimate problem. I thought that maybe the question; “What, if anything would persuade you to purchase wearable technology?”, would provide insight, but after reviewing my user survey with two unofficial test users (since I learned that you should always test your survey before you deploy it), they informed me that it was too open ended and that they did not actually feel like answering it. I thought back to what I learned in the checkpoint lesson…

Multiple choice questions vs open ended questions reduce cognitive load. You want the process to be as smooth as possible in order to increase the chance that the participants finish the survey.

I also took another look at some of the suggested questions they provided. I knew I wanted to make a survey that was as short as possible to ensure that my users would complete the entire survey so the quality of the questions and the data that they would render would be the most important thing to focus on. So I started my second iteration…