market-research, communicationI’m doing a research for a new idea and I want to obtain the information about its potential market through a survey. But now I have some difficulty designing the survey.
To be specific, I don’t know which kind of question is suitable to ask on the survey. I could ask the participants on the survey questions like
Do you think it’s a good idea ?
Do you think this idea makes the world better ?
or questions like
Do you think this idea benefits you ?
Do you think this idea makes your life better ?
I think both type of them is appropriate from some perspectives and I want to know which one should be more focused on on my survey?
As you don’t tell us what your idea is, I can’t give you specific questions to ask your users, but maybe give some general tips.
There is a great video about How to Run a User Interview on YouTube in which Emmett Shear shares his experiences and there also is a transcript available if you like reading better. Also, most of the following comes from that video.
The questions you propose all are variants of Do you think feature X is great?, and what Emmett Shear repeatedly says in his talk is that you don’t want to ask users directly about features. Specifically, after conducting a short example user interview about note taking apps, he says
You notice we are not talking about the actual content of the app at all. I’m not really interested in features. I don’t want to know about a specific feature set in Google Docs or Evernote. I might dig a little more into which features actually get used. If she’s actively collaborating, how does that work? I heard some interesting things, “ We use a folder.” That’s interesting to me.
The main thing you’re trying to do when running this first set of interviews is not necessarily ask questions about optimizing user flow. Or questions about the specifics of any of that stuff. That can be distracting because users think they know what they want. You get the horseless carriage effect where you’re asked for a faster horse instead of asked to design the actual solution to the problem.
So you want to stay as far away from features as possible because the things they tell you feel overwhelmingly real.
A bit later, he also gives the reason for why not to ask these questions.
Because the feedback you get from users if you tell them about a feature and ask them, “Is this feature good?” is often, “Oh yeah that’s great.” When you actually build it, you find out that while they thought it was a clever idea, no one actually cares to switch and get it. So the one question you can’t ask is, “Is this feature actually good or not?”
You probably want to focus more on the problem you have in mind and try to solve. Try to find out if it actually is a problem for others as well (validate it) or how your (potential) users currently do the things you want to improve.
The mock user interview gives you a great idea what questions you might ask. Unfortunately it is way too long to quote here, but in a nutshell, Emmett Shear asked about how she (the user) currently takes notes, what she uses, how she uses it, and so on. He tries to find out what she’s doing and then tries to infer on his own what the needs and problems actually are.
As for the survey part of your question, he almost directly addresses that in the Q&A part of the talk.
You definitely want to Skype. You don’t want to do interviews over email if you can avoid it, because interviews over email are non-interactive. The most interesting learnings come from the, “Interesting. Tell me more.” […] Email interviews are basically useless. In person or over Skype interviews are also easy to record. Make sure you ask them if it’s ok to record.
Source of the quotes: Transcript. Emphasis mine.
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