Liz Moffatt https://portfolio.lizmoffatt.com Thu, 19 Oct 2023 04:36:46 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.3 https://i0.wp.com/portfolio.lizmoffatt.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/NewFavicon_32by32_2.png?fit=32%2C32&ssl=1 Liz Moffatt https://portfolio.lizmoffatt.com 32 32 172799729 How to write better surveys https://portfolio.lizmoffatt.com/how-to-write-better-surveys/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=how-to-write-better-surveys Thu, 19 Oct 2023 01:07:29 +0000 https://portfolio.lizmoffatt.com/?p=2680

How to write better surveys

There’s no shortage of articles out there on How To Write A Good Survey but, despite all that, I often see clients making the same missteps.

Annoyingly you often don’t realise that you’ve stuffed up your survey until it’s too late. When you find yourself looking at the results, scratching your head and wondering why you still don’t have the answer to the one question you really wanted to know.

 

The aim of this article is to move you past “How to write a good survey” to “How to write better surveys.”

 

Writing a customer survey can be both really simple…

“Hey dude, why do you like my PRODUCT / SERVICE?”

… and, at the same time, much more complex.

 

Whether you want to write better surveys to get feedback from existing clients or to test out an idea for a new product or service, these will help.

 

Sure there are a few caveats and there will always be exceptions but, if you’re a a solopreneur, Coach or, Consultant looking to write better surveys to get feedback from  your clients or test out new ideas, as a general rule, all of these will apply.

1 - Before you start thinking about the wording of individual questions, get clear on these three things:

What exactly is it that you want to find out?

It’s not uncommon for businesses to survey their clients and then, when they are looking at the results, realise that they still don’t have the answer to the thing that they really wanted to know.

Spending some time thinking about what you REALLY want to know will not only help keep your survey focused (see #7), but it will make sure that you can do something actionable with the results.

 

Example:
Do you really want know if people prefer regular coke over diet coke OR do you want to know what soft drink they prefer?

 

Make sure you ask the MOST important thing that you want to know. (You’d be surprised how often this gets accidentally missed out.)

Why do you want to know that?

Being clear about WHY you want to know something and what you’re going to do with the results will not only help you to get more actionable insights, it will also help to build trust with your clients / customers.

 

Example:
If you have no intention of providing something, do not suggest that you might:

If you’re genuinely open to offering something else and  curious about what your clients might like, try something like this instead – Notice the space for someone to write in their own answer.

What are you going to do with the results?

Sure you can ask for someone’s age but how will knowing that help you?

The length of your survey matters (see #7) so don’t waste space with questions that you’re not going to really get value from.

2 - Talk like a human

Be clear with your question and talk like a human.

 

EXAMPLE – Don’t do this:

Do this instead:

3 - Regularly, often and sometimes don’t really mean anything

I regularly go to the gym – I go daily
I regularly get my car serviced – It gets serviced once a year

If you mean weekly, say weekly.
If you mean daily, say daily.

 

BONUS TIP: Avoid phrases like bi-weekly, bi-annually.

This can be interpreted as twice a week or once every two weeks / twice a year or every two years.

When you’re looking at your results you want to be certain about what they mean.

Ordering for an anticipated “twice a week purchase” could mean that you’re left with a bunch of expired stock for something that people actually only buy once every 2 weeks.

 

So, again, say what you mean.

4 - Open V’s Closed questions

Open question: What did you have for dinner last night?
Closed question: Did you have dinner last night?

 

Closed questions tend to be Yes / No questions.
Open questions are, as the name suggests, more open.

 

Open ended questions take longer for people to complete and can make the survey longer. They can also be more involved to make sense of. AND they can give you so much more information then a “which of the following best apply” type question.

 

Closed questions take less time to complete and are easier to analyse, but you can miss out on nuance. By presupposing the answers and asking people to pick option A or option B, you could well miss out on learning something valuable that you hadn’t thought of.

 

A middle way is to give a few predetermined responses and then also include an “Other, Please State” answer option where people can type in their own response.

 

Example:

5 - Avoid double questions

Okay, so say you like chips but not fish, how would you answer this question? Would you say A – Yes, because you like one of the two or would you say B – No, because you don’t like both fish and chips?

If you have a question like the one below and someone shares their details, you can’t be sure if they are interested in your other services or if they are happy to talk to you about their responses.

 

A better way would be to split each question out:

6 - You only get the answers to the
questions you ask

Say you’re running an event and want to know if people prefer Monday or Tuesday.

Using the question above, you might learn that 60% prefer Monday and 40% prefer Tuesday. You also might never know that everyone could make Wednesday.

Also, if this is a compulsory question, by not adding a third answer option “C – None of the above”, you are also potentially forcing people to pick an answer just so that they can move onto the next question. That 60% who said they could make Monday might turn out to be much lower.

7 - Survey length matters

Test your survey before you send it out.

Go through it as your client / potential customer would and time how long it takes from start to finish.

Now get someone who hasn’t seen the survey before and ask them to do the same.

As a general rule (and assuming you’re doing an online survey) anything over 2 or 3 minutes is too long. 5 minutes is definitely too long. 20 minutes…. Nope.

If it’s too long people will give up part way through.

Don’t lie and say “It’s only 2 minutes” when you know it’s longer. Seriously.

8 - The order you ask questions matters
(aka Avoiding accidentally priming people)

The order of your questions is just as important as the wording.

If you start off asking people about their nutrition habits and then ask them “What’s the most important factor in keeping healthy?” they will be more likely to mention nutrition because they’ve just spent a few minutes thinking about and focussing on it.

The best way to approach this is to write out all your questions and then look at putting them in the order that most makes sense.


Question order is especially important if you’re asking your clients something like “Overall, how satisfied are you with our services?”

 

EXAMPLE:

Say you ask 4 questions in your survey:

  1. How easy was it to contact us when you needed to?
  2. How satisfied are you with the quality of work we did for you?
  3. Did we stick to agreed deadlines?
  4. Overall, how satisfied are you with our services?


Each time you make a change to the first three questions this will potentially impact the score for the final “Overall satisfaction” question. If you’re tracking this score over time, this can make things tricky – did our score change because we got better / worse or because we changed the questions that came before it in the survey?

 

Your best bet is to ask the “Overall satisfaction” question first.

EXAMPLE:

  1. Overall, how satisfied are you with our services?
  2. How easy was it to contact us when you needed to?
  3. How satisfied were you with the quality of work we did for you?
  4. Did we stick to agreed deadlines?

 

This way you can add in / remove / change any of the other questions without them impacting your “Overall satisfaction” question.

9 - Anonymous V’s not

Clients might not want to hurt your feeling by telling you that you suck. Especially if that client is also a friend.

Let people be anonymous if they want to be.

If you want to be able to follow up with people on individual responses, consider adding a “Hey, can we contact you to discuss your feedback in more detail” question at the end of your survey.

 

EXAMPLE:

10 - Don’t over survey people

I know, you’re keen to get feedback after every session. Don’t do it.

Asking after the first session and again at the last session is probably the max. If you’re only doing three sessions, ask for feedback after the last session.

If you have a regular client for recurring project work, ask after the first project and then again in a year.

BONUS #11 - Sampling
(aka Who to include in your survey)

Getting feedback from existing clients

If you want to get feedback from your clients ask all of them, not just the ones where things went well.

Depending on what you want to know, you might also like to consider getting feedback from people who approached you but didn’t commission you for work.

Getting feedback from potential customers

If you’re trying to gauge interest for a new idea make sure you ask the relevant people and be aware of skewing your sample.

  • If you’re using social media to ask your questions or share your survey be aware that different types of people use different social media platforms. Where people do use multiple platforms, they will likely be in a very different mindset when using one over the other. For example, asking your connections on LinkedIn about their health and wellness will give you very different responses to if you ask the same questions on TikTok.
  • The same principle applies to physical geography – if you stand on the corner by a busy train station in the city and talk to people about your idea for a product or service, you will get different people compared to if you went to a local coffee shop in a more rural area.
  • Don’t just ask your friends. The chances are that your friends will have similar opinions, habits and ways of seeing the world to you. If you’re exploring a new idea for a product or service you need to talk to a wider variety of people.

 

Think about who you want to hear from or who you want to learn out about and ask them. Ask them in a variety of places. If you want to talk to new parents, try a Facebook group for new parents and a local community parents group. If you want to talk to solopreneurs, try a local co-working space or LinkedIn group (or Facebook). If you want to talk to long distance runners try looking for a local running group or asking if you can talk to customers waiting to buy new running shoes at the local running shop.

And there you have it, 10 tips on how to write better surveys.

Like I said, survey writing can be super simple and annoying complex at the same time.

I’ve been in the business of asking people what they think about various things for over 20 years now and while that doesn’t make me an expert it does mean that I’ve seen (& made!) enough mistakes to know better.

If you found this helpful and want to tell me about it, feel free to email me (hello@lizmoffatt.com)  and we can high-five to your success over email.

May The Fore be with you.

I acknowledge the traditional custodians of the lands and waterways in which I work.
I pay my respects to elders past, present and emerging.

www.portfolio.lizmoffatt.com

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© Elizabeth Moffatt 2023

]]> 2680 Why does the customer care about that? https://portfolio.lizmoffatt.com/why-does-the-customer-care-about-that/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=why-does-the-customer-care-about-that Wed, 09 Dec 2020 04:03:27 +0000 https://portfolio.lizmoffatt.com/?p=2781

Tell me why the customer cares about that

When I’m working as a Customer Experience Designer / Human-Centred Designer, this is one of my favourite conversation prompts.

As part of my approach to teaching people about Human-Centred Design and Design Thinking, I ask them to bring along a problem they are trying to solve or an idea they have. Often, especially in the corporate world, the problem turns out to be a business problem rather than a customer problem – let me explain:

“We need more people to buy or use our product / service”


“People aren’t using our product / service the way we want them too”


“People are leaving because they aren’t happy with our product / service”

While these might all be real problems they aren’t actually customer problems.


Let’s take, for example, “People aren’t using our product / service the way we want them to.” Maybe people aren’t using your product / service in the way you want them to because they have found a different way, a new way that suits them more.


Posing the question “Why does the customer care about that?” helps refocus on the person who is using or purchasing the product or service. The question invites you to step into the customers’ shoes and see the world through their eyes for a moment, to consider things from their point of view, to think about their experiences and pain points.

If we look at tetra packs, they are (so I’m told) designed to be poured with the spout at the top rather than the bottom. Pouring with the spout at the top helps to balance the amount of air coming out of the container and reduces the splashing yet most people (including me) pour with the spout at the bottom. I tired pouring from the top… it felt weird and I did not like it.

Many of us are, apparently, using this product feature “wrong” but do any of us care?
Probably not.

How do you pour yours?

Ok, but how about the problem “People aren’t using it properly, they’re getting annoyed with it and leaving.”
 Well, tell me why the customer cares about that – let’s see if we can get a deeper understanding, and see things from their perspective. Let’s use a gym membership or a health insurance product as an example. How might this be a problem from the customers’ perspective?
  • They don’t use it properly so they can’t get any benefit from it – they can’t use the gym or make any claims
  • They don’t use it at all so they don’t get any value – why do I have this gym membership when I never use it?
  • When they try to use it they can’t and it’s frustrating / annoying when they find out they can’t – I went to the dentist & I thought my insurance would cover it but it didn’t
  • They went all the way there and had a wasted trip – I went all the way to the gym but I couldn’t get in because my membership is only for off-peak classes
  • They didn’t realise they couldn’t use it until after the work / service had been provided – I went to the dentist and it was only after all the work had been done and I went to pay at reception that I realised I wasn’t covered, what do I do now?


Now we start to get a fuller picture. We start to get down to peoples’ needs.

Instead of looking at how to get someone to use something differently we start to focus on the problem of people not understanding how to use their gym membership / insurance product; we start to look at how might we make it easier for people to use their gym membership / insurance product, how might we provide a safety net so that if people do get caught with an unexpected expense they aren’t left red faced and unable to pay; How might we help members who come to workout but have come at the wrong time?


All of these will have very different solutions to “How do we stop people leaving because they can’t use their membership / insurance?” because these solutions focus more on the source. They focus on the actual need of the customer.


Give it a try, the next time you are thinking about a problem that you want to solve, ask yourself or a colleague “Why does the customer care about that?” you might be surprised what you come up with.

If you found this helpful and want to tell me about it, feel free to email me (hello@lizmoffatt.com)  and we can high-five to your success over email.

May The Fore be with you.

I acknowledge the traditional custodians of the lands and waterways in which I work.
I pay my respects to elders past, present and emerging.

www.portfolio.lizmoffatt.com

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© Elizabeth Moffatt 2023

]]> 2781 When unconscious bias isn’t so unconscious anymore https://portfolio.lizmoffatt.com/when-unconscious-bias-isnt-so-unconscious-anymore/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=when-unconscious-bias-isnt-so-unconscious-anymore Tue, 26 May 2020 23:28:51 +0000 https://portfolio.lizmoffatt.com/?p=2776

That moment when unconscious bias isn’t so unconscious anymore

Unconscious bias effects our lives in so many ways: the people we gravitate toward or away from on public transport, the opportunities we offer to people, or don’t and the way we interact with others around us, perhaps smiling or avoiding eye contact. Thing about unconscious bias is that it happens without us being aware of it (the clue’s kinda in the name there….) – without intentionally looking for it you won’t see it.


On a recent trip to LA I realised I had an unconscious bias. I was leaving Union Station to catch a bus when someone walked past me and commented on the number of people lined up to get cabs. This person also mentioned they were taking the bus… the same bus that I was headed for. Rather than think, “Oh, that’s happy coincidence, they can help me find the bus stop” my thoughts went more like this “Oh my gosh, they overheard me asking for directions to the bus stop and now they are trying to engage me in conversation so they can steal my bags.”


— For context, I’d just got off a 15+ hour flight from Australia. I was visibly tired and not sure where I was going, I was also carrying luggage and clearly not able to run anywhere fast. (Ok, so part of me explaining that is to give you context, but another part is me still making excuses to myself…) —


Back to the story and, surprise, it turned out that this person just happened to be getting the same bus that I was headed for. They had no sinister motive at all. They had walked faster than me so they caught the bus that was just about to leave. I, along with all my bags, my unconscious bias and my suspicion, were purposely walking slowly so we could get the next bus.


I didn’t think too much about it until a few minutes later. I arrived at the bus stop and someone else arrived… someone of a similar appearance to the person who had made the comment about the people getting cabs. Rather than sit down to wait for the bus they were alternately leaning on the bus shelter and wondering around. Now I wasn’t sat down either, I was stood a little way from the bus shelter but in my head, in my view of the world, it was ok for me to stand up while I was waiting, it wasn’t ok for this other person to do the same….


We both got on the bus and after a while I noticed this person looking at me. I remember becoming really aware of where all my bags were and making sure I was holding onto them. I was also making up a story in my head (check out Dr Brene Brown for more on how and why we do that) that this person was going to wait until I got off the bus, get off immediately behind me and grab me. What actually happened was that a few stops before mine, this person stood up to get off the bus, looked me in the eye, smiled kindly and softly wished me a good day.


That was when the penny dropped.

It dropped so hard it hit me hard in my heart.

Unconscious bias.

Oh eff-it!

I felt awful, I wanted to run after this person and apologise for judging them.

“I’m sorry, it wasn’t me, it was my unconscious bias!”

I’m pretty sure they had noticed my “Where are my bags?” behaviour and I thought about how they might feel if that’s the sort of reaction they experience often. I also thought about how experiencing that, repeatedly, over a period of time might impact them.

Realising you have an unconscious bias can be confronting and it was particularly confronting for me. I like to think I treat everyone fairly and that I don’t discriminate based on age, skin colour, country of origin, appearance or anything else. I grew up a multi-cultural area of the UK, I went to school and was friends with kids from all sorts of religions, cultural backgrounds, kids who spoke different languages, ate different food and whose belief systems were different to mine.

Learning that I had an unconscious bias, and realising that I wasn’t treating everyone as fairly as I thought did was, quite frankly, a bit of a slap in the face.

We rarely enjoy finding out things about ourselves that challenge our self-view but it’s only by diving into those shadows and shining a light that we can we start to make the unconscious conscious and, from there, start to change.

Unconscious bias stems from making assumptions about people. One way to reduce your unconscious bias is to learn more, to look for examples where the group you may be biased against are reflected in a way that contrasts with your bias. Sometimes we shy away from the unknown so looking for opportunities to be around different people, and maybe even have a conversation, can help widen our perspectives – it certainly did mine.

I acknowledge the traditional custodians of the lands and waterways in which I work.
I pay my respects to elders past, present and emerging.

www.portfolio.lizmoffatt.com

Envelope Linkedin Medium

© Elizabeth Moffatt 2023

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