What we want to discover?

The first thing to do is to define the objective for which we are making a survey. Working with a clear objective will help the process be focused and will get better results. Plan carefully and determine the information that you really need at that moment.

We should avoid surveys with lots of questions that do not have a clear purpose.

They will produce poor outcomes and result in meaningless exercises for the participants. On the contrary, if we have a general leitmotiv for the questionnaire, it will also help the participants understand how the effort of completing the survey will help the company, and therefore it will give clear value to the time expended.

You can plan your survey by following different approaches and your questions can be focussed on short-term or long-term goals. When you focus your research on long-term planning, your purpose is to understand your users expectations and their view about your product in the future; this will help to plan the evolution of your application and create new features that match their needs. For example, imagine that you are designing a music application and you are not sure about focusing on mass majority music or maybe giving more visibility to amateur groups. Creating a long term survey could help you understand what your users need to find in your platform and plan changes that match the conclusions extracted from the survey analysis. When you think of short-term planning, the purpose of the questions are more related to operational actions. The objective with these kind of surveys is to gather information for taking actions later with a defined mission. These kind of surveys are useful when we need to choose between two options, that is, whether we are deciding to make a change in our platform or not. For example, it could help to decide which piece of information is most important for the user deciding which group to listen to, so we can decide to make the music genre or other users' ratings more visible. We will take better decisions by understanding which are the main aspects our users will expect to find in our platform, and how they let the users explore the content.