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Creating Effective Surveys 

Brian Flaherty

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Leveraging Personas:
How to Make Better Business Decisions 

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As a young boy I eagerly looked forward to Sunday nights. After dinner and a warm bath, I would sit in front of the television and watch The Muppet Show with my family. As a grade-schooler, it felt as if my family would invite the whole cast of characters into our household - Kermit, Miss Piggy, Fozzy Bear, the Swedish Chef, and Animal, to name a few. However, if any of these characters were really invited over for dinner, I suspect we might prepare each meal differently depending on who was our guest. Being sophisticated and expecting the finer things, Miss Piggy would demand we take out our fine china with fancy place settings. Clearly, we would not serve bacon-wrapped ANYTHING. On the other hand, Animal might have difficulty with foods that could not be cleaned up easily, like grape juice or spaghetti with marinara sauce, and we’d have to use paper plates. As host for this dinner, my family would need to thoughtfully consider each guest before making decisions about the meal we might serve. 

Similarly, in the workplace, we need to consider the unique needs and goals of each of the people we ultimately serve: the coworkers, users, beneficiaries (or whomever you consider your customers) of the programs, products, services, or even policies that impact them. Short of involving our customers in every step of our work to influence our business decisions, we can leverage personas. Personas are fictitious, specific, and concrete representations of  target customer groups for a product or service that creates a sense of empathy for real customers. They provide an actionable narrative that leverages research, as well as internal understandings. 

THE SAD TRUTH

Personas are the result of rigorous research, often a combination of qualitative and quantitative research. There are different types of personas too, depending on the need. Marketing-focused personas help businesses make decisions based on their understanding of their current or future customers. These personas often benefit for-profit companies who seek to make revenue-based decisions for attracting and retaining customers. On the other hand, product-focused personas help businesses make decisions based on the behaviors, needs, and goals of users of their products. These personas benefit companies who produce digital or physical products, informing such things as the product roadmap or features that might best meet the desires of its user base. 

Unfortunately, in the product space, these personas are often left collecting dust on the shelf. Why? There are a few common reasons, including:

• Focus on Tech: Technical teams may be so solution-focused that they prioritize their understanding of system roles and permissions rather than taking the time to gain empathy for real people and their usage stories. They may think that it’s not their responsibility to have a deep understanding of their users’ needs and goals. 
• Focus on Business Goals: Businesses build roadmaps based on organizational drivers and may not regularly collect or consider customer feedback. They may think that it’s not their responsibility to have a deep understanding of their users’ needs and goals. 

• Focus on Delivery: Product teams sometimes rush to a solution before understanding or addressing the right problem. These teams design and develop for themselves, assuming they know what’s best for their users. They may think that it’s not their responsibility to have a deep understanding of their users’ needs and goals. 

In my experience, successful teams do not only focus on their own skill sets and individual responsibilities. They share the critical responsibility of knowing who their users are and understanding their unique needs and goals. One design leader I look up to argues that it is the responsibility of everyone on a product team to “embrace regular and frequent exposure to users.​ 2 hours every 6 weeks​.” (Jared Spool, User Interface Engineering). While that may be impossible to achieve, it begs the question, when was the last time you observed customers using your product or service? 

GETTING STARTED

If you’ve ever attended the “Introduction to Human-Centered Design” training offered to the community, we sometimes ask attendees, “Who is your customer?” Regularly we hear attendees respond with one name, such as “beneficiary” or “coworker.” The fact is that each of us should be able to identify at least three customers who benefit from our work. So first, we must identify those unique people types that benefit from our product or service. Even if you do not have a research-focused person on your team, you can develop what is called “proto personas,” which are hypothesis-based, unvalidated by real users. Take some time to document what you already know – locate background materials stored somewhere. Speak to people in your organization who have interacted with these people. Analyze quantitative data stored in a database somewhere. Or simply recall experiences you’ve had interacting with these people. While there is no universally accepted format or style to tell this person’s story, there are a few things we might include. In fact, after an analysis of various personas created across this community of application development organizations (ADOs), our team identified some common elements often included: 

8 min

From working out what you want to achieve to providing incentives for respondents, survey design can take time. But when you don’t have hours to devote to becoming a survey-creation guru, a quick guide to the essentials is a great way to get started.

In this article, we’re going to reveal how to create a survey that’s easy for survey respondents to complete, hits the research questions you’re interested in, and produces data that’s easy to work with at the analysis stage.

1. Define the purpose of the survey

Before you even think about your survey questions, you need to define their purpose.

The survey’s purpose should be a clear, attainable, and relevant goal. For example, you might want to understand why customer engagement is dropping off during the launch of a new online product. Your goal could then be something like: “I want to understand the key factors that caused engagement to dip upon launch of the new product, including both internal and external elements.” Or maybe you want to understand customer satisfaction with a product or service. If so, the goal of your survey could be: “I want to understand how customer satisfaction is influenced by customer service and support, including online and offline channels.”

The idea is to come up with a specific, measurable, and relevant goal for your survey. This way you ensure that your questions are tailored to what you want to achieve and that the data captured can be compared against your goal.

2. Make every question count

You’re building your survey questionnaire to obtain important insights, so every question should play a direct role in hitting that target. Make sure each question adds value and drives survey responses that relate directly to your research goals. For example, if your participant’s precise age or home state is relevant to your results, go ahead and ask. If not, save yourself and the respondents some time and skip it.

It’s best to plan your survey by first identifying the data you need to collect and then writing your questions. You can also incorporate multiple-choice questions to get a range of responses that provide more detail than a solid yes or no. It’s not always black and white.

3. Keep it short and simple

Although you may be deeply committed to your survey, the chances are that the respondents, well... aren’t. As the survey designer, a big part of your job is keeping their attention and making sure they stay focused until the end of the survey. Respondents are less likely to complete long surveys or surveys that bounce around haphazardly from topic to topic. Make sure your survey follows a logical order and takes a reasonable amount of time to complete. Although they don’t need to know everything about your research project, it can help to let respondents know why you’re asking about a certain topic. Knowing the basics about who you are and what you are researching means they’re more likely to keep their responses focused and in scope.

4. Ask direct questions

Vaguely worded survey questions confuse respondents and make your resulting data less useful. Be as specific as possible, and strive for clear and precise language that will make your survey questions easy to answer.

It can be helpful to mention a specific situation or behavior rather than a general tendency. That way you focus the respondent on the facts of their life rather than asking them to consider abstract beliefs or ideas. Different question types will also allow for a variety of clear answers that help to uncover deeper insights. Good survey design isn’t just about getting the information you need, but also encouraging respondents to think in different ways.

5. Ask one question at a time

Although it’s important to keep your survey as short and sweet as possible, that doesn’t mean doubling up on questions. Trying to pack too much into a single question can lead to confusion and inaccuracies in the responses.

Take a closer look at questions in your survey that contain the word “and” – it can be a red flag that your question has two parts. For example: “Which of these insurance providers has the best customer support and reliability?” This is problematic because a respondent may feel that one service is more reliable, but another has better customer support.

6. Avoid leading and biased questions

Although you don’t intend them to, certain words and phrases can introduce bias into your questions or point the respondent in the direction of a particular answer.

As a rule of thumb, when you conduct a survey it’s best to provide only as much wording as a respondent needs to give an informed answer. Keep your question wording focused on the respondent and their opinions, rather than introducing anything that could be construed as a point of view of your own. In particular, scrutinize adjectives and adverbs in your questions. If they’re not needed, take them out.

7. Speak your respondent's language

This tip goes hand-in-hand with many others in this article – it’s about making language only as complex or as detailed as it needs to be when conducting great surveys.

Create surveys that use language and terminology that your respondents will understand. Keep the language as plain as possible, avoid technical jargon and keep sentences short. However, beware of oversimplifying a question to the point that its meaning changes.

8. Use response scales whenever possible

Response scales capture the direction and intensity of attitudes, providing rich data. In contrast, categorical or binary response options, such as true/false or yes/no response options, generally produce less informative data.

If you’re in the position of choosing between the two, the response scale is likely to be the better option.

Avoid using scales that ask your target audience to agree or disagree with statements, however. Some people are biased toward agreeing with statements, and this can result in invalid and unreliable data.

9. Rephrase yes/no questions if possible

As we’ve described, yes/no questions provide less detailed data than a response scale or multiple-choice, since they only yield one of two possible answers.

Many yes/no questions can be reworked by including phrases such as “How much,” “How often,” or “How likely.” Make this change whenever possible and include a response scale for richer data.

By rephrasing your questions in this way, your survey results will be far more comprehensive and representative of how your respondents feel.

10. Start with the straightforward stuff

Ease your respondent into the survey by asking easy questions at the start of your questionnaire, then moving on to more complex or thought-provoking elements once they’re engaged in the process.

This is especially valuable if you need to cover any potentially sensitive topics in your survey. Never put sensitive questions at the start of the questionnaire where they’re more likely to feel off-putting.

Your respondent will probably become more prone to fatigue and distraction towards the end of the survey, so keep your most complex or contentious questions in the middle of the survey flow rather than saving them until last.

11. Take your survey for a test drive

Want to know how to make a survey a potential disaster? Send it out before you pre-test.

However short or straightforward your questionnaire is, it’s always a good idea to pre-test your survey before you roll it out fully so that you can catch any possible errors before they have a chance to mess up your survey results.

Share your survey with at least five people, so that they can test your survey to help you catch and correct problems before you distribute it.

Survey Design Best Practices: Learn about a survey life cycle, general guidelines and best practices in survey design, and how to avoid common problems while gaining insight with this popular research method. More information and registration coming soon!

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Now once these hypothesis or assumption-based proto personas are developed, it’s time to validate them. Set up time to talk to these target users. Ask questions. Really uncover their needs and goals. Be prepared to tell a rich story about these people. The story should not just be about using your product or service. Delve into what makes each persona group unique. The goal is to share each unique story with your team, not just so they have the facts, but so they can make empathy-informed decisions about the product or service. 

Image RemovedREAL WORLD USES 

So, once we bring back a proto persona or a fully validated persona, how can teams make better business decisions by leveraging these artifacts? My encouragement to you would be first to  consider the ways you might involve a real person in your day-to-day work cadences. Do you have recurring meetings where you discuss work that will impact your customer? Do you create project artifacts so that other team members have clear expectations about the work they are to produce? Clearly, we cannot invite our users to attend every meeting we attend and read every document produced to align our team. So, how might we creatively represent them, so they have a figurative seat at the table? The diagram here illustrates that we achieve the best solutions when our users are equally represented in our conversations and considered in our business decisions.

So how can we represent them? I offer a few creative options, including: 

• Create user stories that replace “user” or “role” with the actual name of your persona, and link to the persona for those who may be unfamiliar with their user types 
• Print out personas and decorate your workspace with them. Better yet, once we return together in person, post personas in communal spaces where they will get views, like lunchrooms or even bathrooms!  
• Create a cardboard cutout of each persona and have team members adopt one and take it with them to physical meetings. Or, if virtual, create a digital headshot and have team members sign in 2 times to your web meeting, once as you and once representing one of your personas. 
• Create trading cards for a team-building activity or for new employee onboarding. Pass out a stack of trading cards that only represent 1 of many personas. Your job is to talk with other team members and trade so that you end up with a full set. 

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Now some forty-something years later, as a parent I sometimes slip into the role of a Muppet Show character. While my wife is strong in her impression of Miss Piggy, I do a mean Kermit as well as Swedish Chef impression. With my 5-year-old, my antics are well-received and memorable for her. For my teenage daughters, they are memorable, just for another reason. As I think back to my own best experience using personas, I recall a meeting I had with the development team. Being in the edtech space, I likely created some silly name for this persona like “Edith Educator” or something along those lines. And I remember as the team was negotiating the level of effort required to create a feature, one cantankerous engineer stated a matter-of-factly, “This feature would not be delightful enough for Edith, who has to use this capability every day!” I just about fell out of my seat. That is why we create and infuse persona artifacts into the everyday cadence of our teams. Make them representative. Make them memorable. Use them every day. 

READY. SET. GO.