Web designers have quite a difficult task creating designs that everyone like. As an individual, you may find it quite difficult to create a product that will appeal to other people, especially with such great dynamics in human preferences. However, there are some shared opinions that you could use to create website designs that are popular to more people. Building the right website design for the right people is essential for the success of that website. The website design is one of the most important aspects of a website, before you even get to the content. Many people will stay or leave the page based on what they think about the design of the page.

You can use surveys to gain insight from users in order to ensure that your design meets your user’s needs in the future. You need to find out what enhancements your users want, why competing websites are beating you out or what features do your users really like.

Creating a great survey is quite similar to creating a user-friendly website design. It can be a waste of time and even money if you do not make the user the center of the process. If you want to gather useful information, you need to create a very effective survey.

Source: kalanidhitechnologies.com

Survey early

You need to survey your website design before it goes live. Once the page is already up and running, making changes could confuse the users and lead to loss of user traffic to the page. You can either:

• Survey before designing to determine the kind of designs that users want to see for the particular brand the website is going to represent. Do the users want to see colorful websites, slide shows, background images and videos, site maps? You can focus the entire design process based on the expectations of the users who are to visit the site once it is up.
• Survey after designing – you can create a trial website for survey to determine how well you capture the user’s expectations. You can survey the same audience or survey a different audience to find out how visually attractive the design is, what aspects of the design stand out and other user experience before setting up the website on the internet. This will allow you to make necessary changes before the website goes live.

Source: ew3.com

Surveying often helps you to measure your progress in the design process to see how well you have implemented design concepts that match the user’s interests.

Less is more

When creating surveys, it is advisable to keep the questions clear and short. Closed ended questions are great for accurate results. However, including some open-ended questions can also give you better insights into the user thoughts. You need to minimize the length of the responses to open ended questions so you do not have to wade through too much fluff when reading the responses. Do not ask too many questions – keep it simple and straightforward. You do not want users losing interest and dropping out of the survey before finishing it. You should focus on questions that give key insights on design features including:

• Point of visit
• Ease of navigation
• Website speed
• Memory of content and images used
• Solving of pain points

Make sure to group similar questions together so that the respondent can organize their thoughts and go through the survey faster.

Incorporating user feedback

Analyzing survey data will help you decide what design changes you need to make. Doing this together with others from your team will make the job much easier.  Enter survey results into an Excel spreadsheet or share it with your team using free online tools.Once everyone is able to see the results start asking the hard questions.  What is the cut off point for the percentage of the most popular answer to determine whether to implement a change? How does this new change affect the rest of the design? Do you need to go back to the conceptualization stage?

Surveying users and incorporating feedback may seem like a lot of extra work, but the time and a resource saved by getting feedback early and often is truly worth it.

Author bio

VinodJethwani is the CEO and Founder of Walnut Solutions and he helps web based companies with his SEO strategies to grown their revenue. He started his career in 2007 as a software developer with an Indian based MNC and later in 2011 became an entrepreneur. Follow him on Twitter @VinodJethwani or through his blog.