Second major thing in the user research process is the so called Online survey. I used “survey monkey” because it is free and provides a good set of tools to create, collect and analyse surveys. With six usual questions I tried to save people’s time and in the same time to take the most of the date they have provided.
Design survey
1. When was the last time when you visit airline website?
I spotted one mistake while trying to take the most from the first question in terms of communication. It will be much more relevant for the entire survey to ask not about the last visit of the user but about the actual booking process. So the question became:
1. When was the last time you booked a flight online?
This is the question that should introduce the user to the survey. And it is actually very important to get initial knowledge about the actual usage of airline sites. If the user books online once a year or even less – this would’t be very representative. If she does it every month or even every week – this will be much more helpful for further analysis. For example such a user will be worth tens or even hundreds of times more than those who book ones a year.
2. Did you try flights aggregation websites like Skyscanner? If yes which was it?
Second iteration:
If you did use a flights aggregator like Skyscanner why did you do so?
So called flight aggregators are more powerful than ever.
Survey monkey told me to change the design of the question so I ended up like this:
3. If you did use a flights aggregator like Skyscanner why did you do so?
This is an unstructured question to gather qualitative data.
3. Which airline(s) did you travel with?
Simple text field is presented to the audience.
4. What was your main driver?
This one is kind of clear. At this point I was not sure if I should add a question about the purpose of the trip: business or leisure. But I wanted not to exceed the number of question, so I did not include this one.
5. What was the overall experience of the process of booking? (1 – Completely agree 6 – completely disagree)
After some initial thoughts I decided to change the two-words-categories to complete sentences:
I booked the flight without any problems – instead of -Waiting time
The website was very jumpy – instead of – Ease of use
I was not sure if that type of question – Matrix/Rating scale is the right one or I should stick to multiple choice.
5. What was the overall experience of the process of booking? (1 – completely agree, 3 – not sure about that, 6 – completely disagree)
In the end I decided to keep the Matrix scale but with different more clear (in my opinion) rows – statements:
- It was easy to book
- Everything was clear on the website
- I went fast through the process
6. Are you aware of CO2 emissions that the flight will emit into the atmosphere?
With a little help from the profi:
6. Were you aware of the amount of CO2 emissions to be produced by the flight you booked?
I put this question because the Global warming problem emerges more and more.
Even Skyscanner shows the results with less CO2
Proposition of corrections by UX writer colleague.
Cheeper may be more expensive in the future, because of some new regulations that require to at least inform the traveller about the CO2 emissions so she can decide if she wants to pay a fee and be carbon neutral or to continue polluting the atmosphere “without” any consequences. No one knows for sure what will happen next 5 or 10 years, but we can at lest inform the user about their impact on the environment.
Depending on the results of this question and the usability testing interview the FlyUX app can be equipped with useful feature for better future 😉
More information about the emissions can be found here.
Collect responses
Now I had to find real users to fill out my “great” survey. As the team from UXDI suggested to not use the Slack channel for promoting the survey I had to find friends and family to do the work instead.
Feedback
K: Q2: No way of selecting Yes and saying why (fixed)
D: Can’t understand the main purpose of the survey
P: from 6to1 not 1to6
V: from 6to1 not 1to6
K: from 6to1 not from 1to6; Q6: Suggest fifth option : Not interested
The findings
After kindly asking a lot of people for help (my goal was 33 respondents) with this task Survey monkey provided me for free with following results:
Survey monkey dashboard with results