When to use Surveys

As mentioned in Interview Structure, Surveys do have a time and place. Below we've outline different purposes for which you would use a survey.

  1. To Source Candidates: Surveys can be a powerful tool to source more interview candidates. By deploying a combination of open- and close-ended questions, you can use your survey as a screening questionnaire to filter or qualify respondents that you want to follow up with through in-person or phone interviews. This way, you're only scheduling meetings with the right audience. Make sure your survey gathers the respondent's contact information so you can follow up.
  2. Check for Broader Sentiment: once you've made your discovery and have found several solutions or product features, a survey can help you prioritize these features with a broader audience.
  3. Quick Feedback: (later on) As people are using the product, you might ask them to rate their satisfaction quickly. Be sure to include an open-ended question to ask "why," and if possible, do some customer interviews.
  4. Interview Note-Taking: this is a more unconventional way to use surveys. Some founders find it helpful to create surveys to fill out themselves as a way to take notes during their customer interviews. The questions can also remind you of the major questions you want to ask. Just make sure the survey allows you to have a flexible conversation.

Close-ended Questions

Advantages: These questions are relatively fast for respondents to answer and will, therefore, likely get more responses.

Disadvantages: These questions only allow you to explore things we already know, but they don't allow you to discover anything you hadn't thought of when creating the survey. Additionally, it can be very challenging to phrase questions and answers in a way that does not bias the respondent. Respondents tend to want to give answers they think you want to hear.

Questions may include:

<aside> 🙌 Survey Tip: Try not to be too obvious about what you want or who you're looking for. For example, avoid doing too many "yes or no" questions where the obvious answer is "yes."

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Open-ended Questions

Advantages: One way to use surveys in customer discovery is to include open-ended questions that allow respondents to write a narrative. Because you aren't constraining respondents by the options you have presented, you won't bias or prime them with your intentions.

<aside> 🙌 Survey Tip: One way to make these open-ended qualitative answers more quantitative for analysis is to input the answers into a word cloud generator like Wordcloud (link) or Wordle (link), which will produce a visual with the most frequently mentioned words.

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Disadvantages: Because these questions do take more work and thinking and, therefore, time, you will get fewer responses, and many may be extremely short. Furthermore, you won't have the opportunity to dig into any part of the respondent's answer with "why" and "tell me more about this." As mentioned in our customer interviews, follow-up questions frequently get to the heart of the problem. Many respondents might lose patience with too many open-ended questions, so be sure to issue these questions sparingly in a survey where you're prioritizing the number of responses.

Questions may include: