Editor’s Note: This is a guest blog post by Rodney Rumford, co-founder of SlimSurveys. He and his colleagues also founded TweetPhoto which grew to over 40 million users and was acquired by Lockerz, a Kleiner-Perkins company. Social Media Club is partnering with SlimSurveys to offer complimentary access to SMC chapters.
Most businesses want and need feedback from their prospects and clients. In this short attention span world, getting users take and complete a survey is a very challenging task. Users simply don’t have the time to take long surveys.
Surveys have historically been long, time consuming, frustrating, and a complicated user experience.
SlimSurveys created a 30 second micro-survey that has no more than 7 questions. In the same way that Twitter revolutionized blogging and communication with the micro-blog that placed constraints on users, we are doing something very similar.
Ensuring that users could have a quick and pleasurable micro-survey experience that they could consume on the web or on any smart phone was a driving principal behind the product that we created.
More email is opened on mobile devices than desktop (as of the first quarter of 2013). This is important because most users discover the link to a survey on their mobile device. Users are also discovering and sharing surveys on social networks like Twitter and Facebook. Having a mobile centric micro-survey that is mobile optimized for quick consumption is critical for user participation.
We asked users at recent TechCocktail and Engadget events take our micro-surveys to provide feedback on the events and presentations. We are seeing completion rates of over 90% which is an unprecedented completion rate for surveys.
We also made it a point to develop 9 question types that are optimized and focus on simple tapping microinteractions of selecting emoticons, star ratings, vote up/down with images to make it fun, and super simple to complete these surveys on any mobile device quickly. Users are presented only 1 question at a time and then it auto advances and shows the next question.
One of the big differentiators is that our surveys are embeddable into any web page or blog post. You can embed the survey just like you would do with a YouTube video with a small piece of copy and paste code. You can take a sample micro-survey that is linked here.
We would love to hear what you think of these micro-surveys and how you might use them. You can build your micro-surveys for free at www.slimsurveys.com.
All SMC members will receive a coupon code for a free 12-month trial. Ask your chapter leader for details. If you’re not yet a member, sign up here.