Website Evaluation Surveys

Types of Website Evaluation Surveys

There are two main types of website evaluation surveys that you can conduct: Website Usability Evaluation Surveys and Website Usability Follow-up Survey.

Survey Types

• Website Usability Evaluation Survey - The goal of this type survey is to obtain two types of information. First, information on how often visitors use your site. Although this information can be partially obtained using tools such as Google Analytics, asking visitors will provide more reliable results, mainly because they may use multiple computers which would make them appear as different visitors.
  
  The second type of information to obtain is what visitors like and dislike about the website or web page. Asking for both is important. What they like will help you find elements in your site that work and replicate them elsewhere. Asking for what they dislike will help you identify where changes are needed. If you collect frequency of use information, you will be able to take into account what the most frequent visitors have indicated when responding.
  
  
• Website Usability Follow-up Survey - Once you have made changes to your website, you should run a second Website Usability Evaluation Survey with as much as possible new visitors that have not responded to the previous survey. You should also conduct a follow-up survey with the visitors that responded to the first Website Usability Evaluation Survey to obtain feedback on the changes you made to your website.

Which website visitors to survey?

For general usability surveys, for example on the main structure of a website, you should only let visitors who have spent a certain amount of time on your site participate. They will be knowledgeable and be able to provide more accurate information.

If your usability survey targets specifics actions accomplished by visitors, you should invite them to participate right after they completed the action. Their memory will be fresh so they will be able to provide more accurate information. However, it is critical to keep the number of questions down to only a few.

What elements of the website to survey?

You can obtain information on many different elements of a website: the structure of the site, the quality of the content, the usability of the site, etc. They key is to not cover too many distinct topics in the same survey.

If your website is large and has many sections or topics, you may want to survey each of them separately. Trying to cover to many topics will be confusing to visitors who respond and their recollection of the many different topics may not be very good.

Keep it relevant to your visitors

In order to increase your level of participation, you need to ensure that your survey is relevant to your website visitors. If your site has many subject-matters, products, services, etc., you need to ensure that visitors are not asked questions that are not relevant to them. For example, do not ask a man shopping for fishing gear questions that relate to cosmetics.

There are two ways to accomplish this. You can either use separate surveys for each group of website visitors. Alternatively, you can use skip logic to create a single flexible survey that will only ask certain questions to certain website visitors based on their answers to certain questions.

We usually recommend using a single survey that uses skip logic. That way demographic data common to all visitors, regardless of which section of the site they use, can be collected in one data set and analysed together.

Automating the process of inviting website visitors to respond by using an Intercept

An Intercept is essentially a mechanism that lets you automatically invite certain of your web site visitors to participate in online surveys. When a web site visitor is intercepted, an invitation message is displayed to the visitor directly in your web site (no redirection to another web site or popup is required). At this point, the web site visitor can either accept or refuse the invitation. See our demo intercept survey for an example. See our Intercepts page to obtain more information on Intercepts.

By using an Intercept Survey, you will be able to collect data automatically without having to send emails or paper questionnaires. Once the Intercept is created and integrated into your website, you can control which website visitors get intercepted by selecting from which pages they can be intercepted, based on the number of pages they have viewed, based on the amount of time the they have spent on the site, and based on a probability of being intercepted.

Increase the response rate

Keeping the survey within a reasonable length will help increase the participation rate. If the survey is too long, you run the risk that participants will abandon it mid-way through. If your questionnaire exceeds 10 questions, you should enable the "Save" option which lets participants save their work and come back to it later.

Another way to boost the participant rate is to give incentives or prizes: diner for two, money, tickets, electronic equipment, etc.

Creating your Website Evaluation Survey with Interceptum

The Interceptum online survey platform offers a wide selection of features to create website evaluation surveys. You will find all the necessary information to create and deploy your survey with Interceptum on our web site.

Creating your website evaluation survey with Interceptum is very easy. All you need to do is follow these simple steps. We also provide a printable getting started guide and a video getting started guide.

• Create a free account
• Create your survey and questions, and test it to make sure your skip logic is correct
• Subscribe to Interceptum
• Send email invitations to your website visitors (alternatively you can use Intercepts, see above)
• Create a report and see the results

Conclusion

Website evaluation surveys are a great way to obtain information that is critical to your website's success. Ideally, website evaluation surveys should be conducted before making any changes to your website and after making the changes. This will allow you to monitor progress and the impact of any changes you may have made based on the results of earlier surveys.