Surveys are great for quickly collecting large amounts of data about your users. At Envato, our design team creates surveys so we can gain valuable insight about the way people use our product.
But preparing a great survey is challenging—writing good questions takes time, and the results can often be disappointing.
Here’s how we used to create surveys: we’d jump straight into writing questions. Our colleagues and stakeholders would give us feedback on the questions without a true understanding of who the survey was for or what we wanted to learn.
Before long we’d have a 20-question, difficult-to-complete monster survey. The results would be just as bad: difficult to understand, with no clear insight.
Surveys are useless until you know who it’s for and what you want to learn from it.
So we created The Lean Survey Canvas to help us prepare better surveys faster (in just a few hours). It allows everyone to collaborate around a single source of truth with all of the information at hand. We now focus on the insight we need or validating our hypotheses rather than writing questions. The result is a more concise survey (under 8 questions) that’s much easier for the participant to complete with clear, actionable insight from the results.
Download The Lean Survey Canvas template here.
The canvas is a non-digital process designed to evolve a great survey in a fast, lean, and iterative way. It’s best completed as a group (make sure you include all the important stakeholders), but you can also work on it by yourself.
Print the canvas out as large as you can and stick it on a wall. You’ll need Post-it notes and spare sheets of paper to allow you to move things around and adapt as you explore the survey.
Follow the order indicated in the diagram above. You’ll find yourself jumping back and forth as you discover new ideas and discard previous ones. Avoid writing any question until you’re happy with the flow of the whole survey—you’ll find that most of the questions you come up with aren’t needed.
You’ll find most survey questions you come up with aren’t needed.
Pro tip: Start by writing notes for each section on separate sheets of paper (allowing you to create as many ideas as possible) before mapping it out onto the canvas itself.
Before you start, decide if your survey will be strategic or tactical—otherwise you won’t get the results you need.
A strategic-focused survey helps you build a better picture of your user and enables you to make better decisions about the future of your product or service.