10 In-App Survey Types and 18 Real-Life Examples from Apps That Get It Right

Everyone asks, "Would you like to upgrade your subscription plan?" but no one asks, "Would you like to go watch the new Barbie movie?". 

Just think. 

One morning you open the Slack app as usual, and there's this microsurvey:

"Wanna go see the Barbie? 🎀 " 

Okay, now it sounds creepy. I see why this might not be a good idea. 

But still, companies should put effort into getting to know their active app users. Not only to make their users feel cared for but also to analyze their customer base and target audience more efficiently. 

You want happy customers? Satisfied users?

A seamless app experience for each and every one of them?

Well, first, you need to know who your customers are, and then you can provide them with irreplaceable services and new features; only then you can turn them into loyal users. 

With their high response rates, in-app surveys are cut out for this job! With the right survey tools, you can collect actionable insights from mobile applications/ desktop applications. You can segment your users, gather detailed feedback from users, track customer satisfaction, and manage product feature requests.

Bye-bye to traditional email surveys with low open rates; hello to in-app surveys that bring contextual, real-time feedback!

Intrigued? Here's what you can do and achieve with in-app surveys  💪💪

10 Types of In-App Surveys with 18 Real-Life Examples

TL;DR

• There 2 types of feedback: qualitative feedback and quantitative feedback. 
  
• While both are equally important for a business, they provide different insights about users. Qualitative feedback helps to understand users' motivations, pain points, and experiences, while quantitative feedback allows for statistical analysis, benchmarking, and tracking changes over time. 
  
• Qualitative feedback is gathered with open-ended questions, whereas quantitative feedback is gathered with ratings, rankings, scales, and other close-ended questions. 
  
• Regardless of its type and purpose, gathering feedback is easier and more effective when it's done within the app, as in-app surveys have higher completion rates than email surveys or Google forms. 
  
• There are various in-app survey question types, including demographic, psychographic, feature, UX, churn, etc.
  
• There are also various in-app survey formats, such as emoji rating, scale rating, star rating, etc. 
  
• To gather meaningful insights, it's essential to have clear and simple survey questions. 
  
• There are various tools you can use to create in-app surveys. 

User Segmentation Surveys

Segmentation surveys are valuable tools that assist companies in categorizing and grouping their customer base based on various factors, such as demographics, psychographics, behavioral characteristics/needs, etc. These surveys are typically short and concise, comprising just 3-4 multiple-choice questions. Most of the time, they are placed at the beginning of a user's journey, such as on welcome screens. 

1. Demographic Surveys

Demographics refer to the statistical data that categorizes people according to specific characteristics such as education level, occupation, income level, etc. And demographic surveys are questionnaires that include questions related to these characteristics. 

Demographic surveys provide data-driven insights about a company's customer base.

Thus, they help;

✅ Product teams to optimize the user experience of different user segments. 

✅ Product teams to come up with various add-on plans, UI improvements, and feature updates. 

✅ Marketing teams to create more targeted campaigns and resonate with the customers.

✅ Customer success teams to understand the unique needs, challenges, and preferences of different user segments and thus provide better solutions. 

Questions to Ask in A Demographic Survey

It's important not to bore a new user trying to set up an account with endless surveys and tens of questions. Also, you shouldn't collect personal information unrelated to a user's onboarding experience or overall customer experience.

In this part, make sure you have all the necessary information to understand and segment your users and nothing more! If your product is a math calculator, you might not need to know if a user is happily married or not... 

Here are some example questions you can ask 👇

🟡 What is your level of education?

🟡 What is your employment status?

🟡 Which industry are you currently working in?

🟡 What is your job title?

🟡 How many people work in your company?

🟡 What is your approximate annual income? 

🟡 What is the average ARR of your company?

Wanna see a real-life example?  🔎🔎

#1 Typeform's Survey

Typeform -a leading survey-making tool in the market- effectively utilizes surveys to enhance the overall app experience for its users. Before all the onboarding processes, they employ an in-app survey that aims to gather demographic information, such as work industry and job title, so that they can enhance the user experience by providing more suitable templates and recommendations. 

2. Psychographic Surveys

Psychographics is a method used to categorize individuals, similar to demographics. However, unlike observable and measurable factors such as income or education level, psychographics delves into the intricate behavioral and psychological aspects of people, such as their values, lifestyles, preferences, motivations, and interests.

By analyzing psychographic data, companies can gain valuable insights into their customers' motivations to use their products/services, tailor their products/services accordingly, and ensure personalized, seamless experiences for the target audience. 

Questions to Ask in A Psychographic Survey

The survey should focus on exploring psychographic factors directly related to the SaaS product and its target audience. 

To draw a clear user profile, you need to cover all the necessary psychological/behavioral aspects of a person that play a crucial role in decision-making -especially when purchasing a product. 

So, although most psychographic surveys consist of drop-down lists, checkboxes, and multiple-choice questions, you might also consider adding a few open-ended questions.

Example questions include 👇

🟡 How much does sustainability matter to you when purchasing a product?

🟡 How do you feel about no-code tools?

🟡 How many hours do you spend in a day ......(some task related to your product/service).......?

🟡 What social media platforms do you use mostly?

🟡 What other project management tools do you use?

🟡 What is your main motivation in using ......(your product).....?

🟡 What challenge prompted you to search out for ......(your product).....?

Different products/services require different questions, of course. 

Let's take a look at a few examples and see how companies from different industries create in-app surveys to gather psychographic data!

#2 Rest of World's Survey

Rest of World is a tech news publication that aims to provide global coverage and diverse perspectives by focusing on news outside of Silicon Valley, breaking free from Western-centric journalism, and bringing stories from every corner of the world to their audience.

#3 Wyze's Survey

Founded by former Amazon employees, Wyze is a start-up that specializes in smart home solutions, offering a range of products, including smart cameras, speakers, air purifiers, and more.

And here's their lovely in-app survey -my favorite by far!! 🐶

#4 Flipboard's Survey 

Flipboard is an online magazine that gathers and carefully selects entertainment, travel, food, sports, and tech news from diverse news agencies, providing a curated experience for its users. 

But you know, sports is a way too big category. 

Thus, Flipboard asks its users what subcategories they're actually interested in right from the beginning! It's good onboarding and good microsurvey-ing. 

Product Usage Surveys 

Released a new app feature? Testing a new UI? Working on a feature update? Or simply want to learn what your users love about your product? 

Product usage surveys got you. 

By simply asking 4-5 questions in your app -and maybe a few follow-up questions-, you can learn whether your regular users love the product updates or not. 

Let's dive into different types of product usage surveys 👇

3. New Feature Feedback Surveys

A new feature feedback survey is the ideal survey to conduct after the release of a new feature or UI, as its purpose is self-explanatory. It allows you to inquire whether users have tried the feature, assess its usability, gauge their satisfaction with the design, and even collect bug reports. The valuable customer feedback gathered from this survey empowers product teams to swiftly implement improvements and make necessary changes based on user input.

We always say it's important to announce an update or a feature release with emails, hotspots, onboarding checklists, etc. Yet what is maybe even more important than promoting a feature is to improve it in accordance with contextual and actionable feedback. 

Questions to Ask in A New Feature Feedback Survey

To ensure you get relevant feedback, you must ask questions with clear purposes so that your respondents can understand them. 

Make sure to mention the update clearly in the question. Don't go and say, "Do you like our new website design? 🌟" if you've only changed the save button. 

Here's what you can ask your users after a feature release:

🟡 On a scale from 1 to 5, how would you rate X feature?

🟡 Are you satisfied with the stability of the X feature?

🟡 Is the X feature easy to find in the UI?

🟡 To what extent do you agree with the following statement? "X feature is easy to use."

🟡 How often would you use this feature?

🟡 Have you experienced any problems using the X feature?

🟡 Does X feature what you expected it to be? 

P.S. Depending on the feature/update you've released and your expectations from survey responses, you can use various survey templates. Emoji reactions, Yes/No questions, ratings, open-ended questions... Embrace a mindset beyond traditional surveys!

Time for a real-life example. Let's continue. 

#5 Disney Genie Survey 

Have you ever been to the Disney parks? 

Yes? No? Well, it's basically a huge theme park with activities, restaurants, and sub-theme parks. As there are thousands of things to do, Disney has a mobile app named "My Disney Experience App" for arranging day trips and reservations. Genie is the service within the app that creates routes and day plans based on your interests and priorities. Your personal Disney tour guide, in short. 

And here's how the product team keeps Genie up-to-date and, well, up-to-expectations 👇

4. Feature/Product Adoption Surveys

You can investigate a feature's or a product's stickiness with in-app surveys, too. 

Though there are tools that show you how often a certain user engages with a particular feature within your product, you can simply ask your active users, as well, if you do not want to complicate things with additional platforms and tools. 

Questions to Ask in A Feature Adoption Survey

You can ask almost all of the new feature feedback questions in a feature adoption survey, too. 

Here are the different ones:

🟡 Which key features do you use most in our product?

🟡 How easy do you find X feature to use?

🟡 How often do you use our product?

🟡 Which feature do you use the least among all our features?

🟡 On a scale of 1-5, how would you rate your overall mobile app experience? 

🟡 Why did you choose us over our competitors in the market? 

🟡 What were you trying to solve with our product today? 

Example:

#6 Qualtrics' Survey

Qualtrics, a prominent research and experience management platform, goes beyond traditional survey solutions by actively utilizing surveys to engage with their users and gather valuable data. They basically practice what they offer -and that is amazing!

5. Feature Prioritization Surveys

If your product has a lot of features/tools that are not necessarily useful to each use case, navigating around the UI and finding one's way to the important features/tools can be hard for the users. 

⚠️ That's also why personalized in-app onboarding experience matters. 

Asking about the main use cases/ purposes or expectations of a new user on the welcome page could save you a lot of confused users. 

Questions to Ask in A Feature Prioritization Survey

See the world from your users' perspective. Examine your strong value propositions. 

And design your onboarding flow or email sequence according. There's no meaning in creating user segments if you're not going to really use them, right? 

Ask these questions:

🟡 What do you want to achieve with our product/service?

🟡 How would the inclusion of the X feature change our product's value?

🟡 For what purposes will you be using our product/service? 

🟡 How do you envision integrating our product/service into your existing workflows or processes?

🟡 What other .......(time management/project management/ experience management/ etc)....... tools do you use?

🟡 What challenges or pain points do you want our product/service to address?

🟡 What are your expectations for the user experience and ease of use of our product/service?

Let's jump to real-life examples, shall we?

#7 Evernote's Survey

Evernote is a popular note-taking and task-management tool that is used by students, academicians, employees, and many others. In order to provide a smooth onboarding experience and be helpful to users throughout their user journeys, Evernote asks a bunch of survey questions to the new users.

Here are the survey questions:

#8 Canva's Survey 

Canva, one of the most used design tools nowadays, does the same too! Thankfully, they know a social media marketer and a high-school student do not need the same templates.

First, they ask your main purpose for using the tool:

Then, they ask for more details:

6. Feature Request Surveys

Every Product Manager (PM) knows the importance of user feedback when it comes to updating the product roadmap. If you want to fully ensure customer satisfaction, you cannot disregard your users' requests and/or reviews. 

Feature request surveys are utilized to gather insights from users regarding their product expectations and desires. These surveys encompass aspects such as provided services, updates to existing features, and the introduction of new features. Unless you want your customers to turn into churns and a bunch of unsatisfied users, it is essential to regularly listen to them and make product improvements accordingly.

Questions to Ask in A Feature Request Survey 

It's important to limit the number of questions and avoid excessive descriptions in feature request surveys to avoid overwhelming users and keep their engagement high. Thus, feature request surveys tend to be short, consisting of 1-2 questions.

Instead of expecting users to meticulously plan out features, focus on capturing the main ideas and allow your product team to handle the implementation details.

Here are some example questions:

🟡 What more functions would you like us to add to our product?

🟡 What feature did you expect but not find in our product?

🟡 Are there any features you'd like to see in our product? Can you describe it shortly?

🟡 Is there a specific feature that you feel is missing from our product?

🟡 If you were to suggest a new feature, what would it be? Can you explain it shortly?

🟡 What other tasks or activities would you like to accomplish using our product?

If you prefer to include a question that asks respondents to describe a feature or task they would like to complete using your product, you can consider an additional question like this👇

🟡 In order to better understand your needs, would you be open to us reaching out to you in the future regarding your feature request?

Now, it's time to see how big companies utilize feature request surveys:

#9 Dropbox's Survey 

Dropbox, a cloud storage software, uses in-app surveys very cleverly and cleanly. Nothing long, nothing complex, nothing confusing. They say just give us some opinions on how can we help you more -a.k.a. how can we make sure you'll be a loyal user of our product. 

#10 Atlassian Jira's Survey 

Jira adopts a different approach -and rather a bold one- to conduct its feature request surveys. It places them within its help section alongside other feedback surveys rather than utilizing pop-ups on its website.

If someone wants a feature so bad, they will find us, Jira says, I suppose.

While opinions may differ regarding the effectiveness of consolidating feedback surveys under a help icon, one noteworthy aspect is how Jira asks respondents if they are willing to participate in product research and be contacted later regarding their feedback.

Customer Satisfaction Surveys 

Okay, we asked our users about their thoughts on our new features as well as the existing ones. However, it is not sufficient to gather actionable insights solely from specific product features. 

How about our customer services? How about our prices? How about our company values? 

We need an overall satisfaction score to assess the quality of our product and gauge the likelihood of customer churn.

And these are the surveys we can use to do that 👇

7. CSAT Surveys 

CSAT surveys help companies to get insights about the overall customer experience throughout the customer journey, including customer support experience and user experience with the product. 

While a high satisfaction score is desirable, it is crucial to obtain genuine feedback from users without any manipulative tactics. Negative reviews and negative feedback are essential for product improvement.

Questions to Ask in A CSAT Survey

CSAT surveys typically comprise direct questions: Do you like us? 🥹 

Or, the likes of it.

Here are some alternatives:

🟡 On a scale of 1-10, how satisfied are you with our product?

🟡 On a scale of 1-10, how satisfied are you with our customer support service?

🟡 On a scale of 1-10, how satisfied are you with our Beta Program?

🟡 Are you satisfied with our pricing? 

🟡 Are you satisfied with your onboarding experience?

🟡 How likely are you to purchase another product from us?

🟡 How likely are you to return to our website/blog?

😍 It's also popular to use emojis in CSAT surveys, as well as multiple-choice questions and ratings. If you want to make things more fun, you can consider emoji reactions, too. 

Example time! 

#11 Facebook's Survey

In today's competitive market, with all the new social media platforms emerging almost every day, it can be hard to stay alive and popular, I must admit. 

Some might say Facebook takes it personally and acts way dramatically, but I kinda like the way they check on their users. 

#12 Flexalon's Survey 

Another way to assess your users' satisfaction is to assess their disappointment in a world without your product, I guess. 

And Flexalon, a Unity plugin for layout and scene designing, prefers this method to collect app feedback. 

8. NPS Surveys 

Net promoter score surveys assist companies in gauging the likelihood of their users recommending their product to others, such as friends or colleagues. 

Have you ever heard something called free marketing?

It's word of mouth. 

⚡ According to research, 83% of customers would trust the recommendation of someone they know. 

Questions to Ask in A NPS Survey 

Net Promoter Score (NPS) has a pretty basic logic. You compare the detractors and the promoters in proportion.

So, there's generally only 1 question:

🟡 How likely are you to recommend our product to a friend/colleague? 

You can prefer scales, ratings, or multiple-choice questions. The format is up to you. 

Here's how big tech companies present their NPS surveys:

#13 Slack's Survey 

Slack, one of the most popular communication programs among professionals and organizations,  presents its NPS survey both on mobile devices and its desktop application.

Slack actually has a very good onboarding flow, too. You can check our Slack UX breakdown from here if you're interested 👈

#14 SaaStock's Survey 

I'm pretty sure you've heard about SaaStock and its international events for SaaS founders. 

They ask their members how likely they're to recommend them to a friend, too. The target market doesn't need to be users and customers; sometimes, it is B2B business founders. 

9. UX Feedback Surveys 

UX feedback surveys aim to gather insights about the users' experience solely with the product rather than their experiences with the success team or support team, contrary to customer experience surveys. 

Questions to Ask in A UX Feedback Survey

🟡 To what extent do you agree with the following statement: This product feels easy to use.

🟡 How would you rate the overall look and feel of our product?

🟡 On a scale of 1-5, how would you rate the UI of our product?

🟡 On a scale of 1-5, how would you rate the navigation of our product?

🟡 Is there anything that makes you confused/annoyed about our product?

🟡 Can you describe any problem you've encountered while using the app?

Here are some example cases:

#15 Evernote's Survey

You remember Evernote's welcome page survey for feature prioritization and onboarding? Well, they take app feedback very seriously and seize every opportunity to improve the product experience for their users.

Dissatisfied users? Who are they?

Isn't it amazing how they ask 5 questions but don't overwhelm us with steps and explanations?

The star rating is really a good method for UX feedback ⭐⭐⭐

#16 Udemy's Survey

Here I am with another star rating survey. This time, from Udemy, an online learning/teaching platform.

And the survey doesn't end here. There are a bunch of yes/no questions in the second part. 

Churn Surveys

One day every user's journey ends... Aren't we all users on a journey? 

Anyway. 

The best thing when a customer churns and end their user journey with you is to learn why. Maybe you can get them back, maybe not. But if someone stops using your product for some reason, there may be others.

Thus, we need answers. And exit surveys, in this case. 

10. Exit Surveys

In most cases, it's incredibly hard to contact a churned user. It's like when they delete their account, they delete their existence on Earth, as well. 

Calls? Emails? Nothing. 

That's why it's important to use in-app exit surveys. If there's a chance a churned user will tell you why she churned, it'll happen seconds before she churns. 

Questions to Ask in An Exit Survey 

If you want to get valuable feedback from your churned users, you should be ready to face the reality: your product was not enough for them. 

Indeed, it's possible to receive positive user responses where they express that your product is not the issue but rather external factors affecting their decision, like budgetary constraints. 

But you need to ask to get these answers. 

Here's what to ask:

🟡 What was the main reason you decided to delete your account?

🟡 Why did you decide to discontinue using our product?

🟡 We're sorry to see you leave. What's your main reason to go? 

🟡 What made you cancel your subscription?

🟡 What were you unhappy with regarding our product?

🟡 What can we do to improve our product?

⚠️ Going with close-ended questions might increase your survey completion rate. Save the open-ended ones for the end of the survey and make them optional to answer. 

Let's see how big SaaS companies say goodbye to their users 👋👋

#17 Monday's Survey 

Monday, a cloud-based project management tool, categorizes the most common churn reasons and presents them to a user trying to delete her account and/or cancel her subscription plan. 

#18 Zoom's Survey

We all used Zoom during the pandemic at least once, if not before. 

I personally still use it. But those who decided not to anymore meet this exit survey before they cancel their subscription. 

And the best part is the follow-up question, where they offer a downgrade. 

Zoom is serious about its key value proposition!

Get Started With In-App Surveys With UserGuiding

UserGuiding has been handling in-app onboarding for years, but now, there's a cool new feature: in-app surveys! With this feature, you can directly communicate with your users through surveys and ask them a bunch of questions right within your product's user interface.

Here's what you can create with UserGuiding:

✅ Star Rating

✅ NPS Rating 

✅ Number Ratings (both 1-5 and 1-10)

✅ Emoji Rating

✅ Thumbs Up/Down

✅ Multiple Choice 

✅ Written Feedback

👉 You can use templates or create from scratch according to your own needs. 

👉 You can trigger it directly from the resource center or a checklist. 

👉 Track the analytics regarding your survey on the dashboard.