Survey
Why?
Collect, mostly quantitative, information from a large sample of your target group.
How?
A questionnaire is developed and handed to a representative sample of participants through the right channels. A variety of online tools can be used to analyse the responses.
Ingrediënts
- A large and representative group of users.
- A survey instrument or tool.
- Be able to phrase questions that are suitable in a survey.
- Someone to proofread or test your questionnaire.
In practice
Surveys are widely used in marketing and sometimes in the early stages of design. This method is quick and inexpensive, however it can be difficult to obtain reliable results.
- Universal methods of design (Martin & Hannington , 2012) spend a couple of pages about surveys. In the Dutch version: chapter 83, p172-173
- A good, comprehensive and compact book dedicated to surveys (in Dutch) is: Basisboek Enquêteren (Baarde & de Goede, 2007)
- Observing the User Experience (Goodman, Kuniavsky, Moed, 2012) has a chapter on Surveys as well. Chapter 12, p327-376
- Nielsen Norman Group talks about challenges and limitations of surveys in this article and gives tips on how to prevent mistakes.