I'm working on a very brief feedback survey as part of our product. To encourage use and simplify the received data I was thinking of restricting it to:
Any comments? How can we improve [product name] to better meet your needs?
Questions:
What are the best options/wording to give for the product feedback and why?
Should it only be yes/no or is that too absolute?
Thanks.
The yes/no question is leading (of sort). You are directly asking for the user if he liked your product or not. If you want honest feedback, I would avoid such questions since experiments have proven that people tend to be polite when reviewing/giving feedback, especially if they are doing so in person.
If you want good feedback, keep the questions open-ended. Let the user decide whether they like it, hate it or just want to highlight anything particular.
That being said, Keep Online surveys short.
Surveys are not great at gauging minor differences anyway — you need direct observation for that.
"How likely are you to recommend Product X?" where 5 = Extremely Likely and 1 = Not At All Likely. From these responses, you can build your product or service's Net Promoter Score. Probably the reason the Net Promoter Score has become so popular with the C-Suite is because it's one simple question that does not require much from the customer, and identifies problem areas that a company can correct, given additional feedback. Charles Schwab, for example, uses Net Promoter and calls customers to learn what prevents them from recommending their services. They use the findings in training their reps. I did a field study with a client who shared that their sweet spot for handling service calls was 4 days, and they knew this because they experienced a drop in their NPS if a problem took longer than 4 days to resolve to the customer's satisfaction. It can be a useful metric, but only if you are willing to devote time to learning the root cause of customer dissatisfaction and are willing to prioritize and address these issues.
Keep it simple. A simple text based entry would give the user the idea that he has freedom to enter what ever he wants. I do understand this might make data analysis much more difficult since you have to read to see what he has written but its a single field to answer and to force him to conform to a definitive yes or no answer or even a maybe answer would restrict his options. Also what will you do if he selects kinda and does not provide any inputs in the second field
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Do you like [product name]? is too vague, example:
Did you like this restaurant ?
- Yes (but the waiter was the worst)
- No (the waiter was the worst, the rest was good though)
Yes and No are not useful, therefore comments are sufficient.
Yes/No are useful if you ask about the value of your product/service.
What is interesting for you is asking for something specific that make your product/service what it is (it can be your market positon asset).
Selling shoes : Did you enjoy walking with shoes X ? Yes / No, comment
Selling websites : Did you easily found what you wanted ? Yes / No, comment
n.b. Simplifing the received data is NOT a good reason to degrade an interface
