Here's how you can effectively gather feedback on your application through user surveys.

Before conducting any type of survey, consumer research, or market research, regardless of the methodology, it is crucial to define the following: 1. Business Objective/Challenge: Clearly defining the business objective provides focus and direction for the research. It helps ensure that the research is aligned with the key issues that need to be addressed. 2. Research Question/Objective: Establishing a clear research objective is essential for selecting the appropriate research methodology. This objective guides the research process, from defining the target audience to developing the questions, questionnaire, survey, or discussion guide, and ultimately informs the analysis.

I have used the following steps when defining goals using surveys for application development: 1.Outline Research Objectives: It is critical to clearly pinpoint the specific goals and questions your survey aims to address. If not folks will not see the value. 2.Identify Target Audience: Whether it is the business units or engineers/devs you need to understand the characteristics and preferences of your audience. 3.Choose Data Type: What are you trying to accomplish or get from the data you are asking fo? You need to determine whether you need quantitative, qualitative, or a combination of both types of data.

Depending on the complexity of project and what data you need to extract I have used various tools. Some of the ones that my team has used are: 1.Google Form: For a free and easy to use tool you cannot go wrong with Google Forms, it integrates well with other Google Workspace tools. It's great for simple surveys and basic analytics. 2.SurveyMonkey: Most business use this tool so it is something folks are familiar with. It offers a range of templates and customization options. It's user-friendly and provides robust analytics to interpret the results. 3. Qualtrics - This is for more complex and in-depth surveys. It provides detailed analytics and integrates with various CRM and marketing automation platforms.

Next step after objectives & methodology, is drafting the Qs. Whether for quant surveys or qual discussion guides, well-crafted Qs are crucial for obtaining meaningful responses and impact the outcomes. 1. Ensure questions are clear & concise to get relevant answers. 2. Create a cohesive flow, with each question logically connected to the previous one, to maintain respondent interest. 3. Use a balanced mix of multiple-choice and scale questions to gauge preferences effectively. Avoid consecutive scale Qs to prevent fatigue. 4. Avoid overloading respondents with too many Qs to prevent loss of interest and mechanical responses. Be mindful of biases and design Qs to counteract them. Pay attention to avoid confirmation biases.

Timing is a crucial aspect to collect user feedback. Strategic moments, like post-update or after key interactions, are ideal. To determine if a feature needs testing, assess its complexity, user impact, and novelty. Features critical to user experience or introducing significant changes should always be prioritized for testing. Identify user impact by analyzing usage frequency, feedback from similar past features, and direct user comments. Skewed feedback can lead to misguided decisions, wasted resources, and diminished user trust.

When folks see a survey, it is usually to get some details out of them that may not be worth their time. Customer surveys, How we did. For app dev it is a bit different as they may think nothing will change based on the results or it may be too technical. A good old fashion gift card to those who participate, recognition to the team. Maybe even providing some sort of webinar or training to those who participate. Finding out what is their interest and that their opinion does matter goes a long way. Sometimes feedback from C level or other leadership team helps drive the fact it was not just checking another box off the PM's list.