When to Conduct Surveys

To survey a group, you need three things: a set of questions, a way to collect responses, and most important, access to the group. This last element can most affect the timing of your survey. If you can't get to your audience, you can't do a survey, and without a stable Web site of your own, gaining access to audiences is difficult. Your competitors certainly won't let you survey their users. Traditional telephone, mail, or in-person surveys are expensive. Email lists are often biased, and email surveys can easily come across as spam. So if you don't have a site to run a survey on, you should be prepared to either wait until your site is up and running or plan for an expensive survey.

If you already have an audience, then timing a survey is determined by what you want to know about that audience. Different surveys require different kinds of timing. A profile, for example, can be done at any time, getting a snapshot of your current user community's makeup. A satisfaction survey could be run before a major redesign in order to understand where people feel the product is failing them so that the redesign can address the problems. A value survey investigating what people find important could be run as a big ad campaign is being designed so that the ad designers know what to focus on when marketing to your audience.

Surveys come in all sizes and structures, and ultimately, timing depends on what kind of survey you want to field and what you want to get out of it.

Note

Although it's possible to use simple surveys to gain a basic understanding of your audience, statistically accurate survey creation is a complex process. This chapter covers only the basic issues. If you intend to field anything more than a simple profile or if important product decisions require accurate numerical results, I recommend finding a professional Web survey company and working with them or reading the following books: Survey Research Methods by Earl Babbie and The Handbook of Online Marketing Research by Joshua Grossnickle and Oliver Raskin.