A well-constructed usability survey can reveal what your users actually want. Here are tips from an experienced designer on putting together a solid survey, and online tools to help.

A site developer needs to know when to listen to their users, and one of the best ways is to survey their likes and dislikes. But putting together solid surveys isn’t always intuitive. Luckily, there are user experience experts such as Caroline Jarrett and various online tools to help.

Surveys now are cheap and easy to do. I receive requests to answer various surveys almost one per week, and I am sure you do as well. But before you start down the survey path, figure out first how you are going to get respondents, and how to make them trust you. Make sure your request looks legit, and that you aren’t just collecting email addresses for spamming them later with other requests. Include some form of reward up front so the respondent is motivated to help you.

Jarrett’s presentation (and upcoming book) are full of great ideas on improving your surveys. Your survey should ask about a recent and vivid experience, because people tend to forget things over time. Ask one question at a time, rather than putting them together into a compound and confusing question. Don’t worry too much about the number of individual points on your rating scale: whether to choose five or seven or an even number, your respondents don’t much care. Do put effort into the “other” category to make it easier to answer or to collect responses that you hadn’t thought of. Keep the preamble information short and sweet, so your respondents don’t have to page through a lot of preliminary screens before they start answering your questions. And don’t collect your demographic data up front, but at the end when a respondent is more likely to fill out this sort of information.

Spend some time perfecting your questions, and testing them quickly to see if you are going in the right direction. This is called pre-testing. It also helps to review all your questions before you field your survey, and make sure that you really need all of them in the final survey. Sometimes you won’t know what to do with the information that you collect on a particular question, so drop it from your survey for this round: you can always field another survey in the future once you figure out what to do with this additional question.

Take a moment and go online and search for “worst survey questions ever.” That will open your eyes to some of the worst examples and things to avoid.