It’s not always easy to understand how to create a product that speaks to your customer’s needs & wants. That’s why the more you interact with your users and make an effort to understand what brings them to you, the better you know what to come up with and how.
Consequently, In-App surveys are crucially essential tools for gathering feedback from users that will enable you to improve the usefulness of your service, help you understand what works and what doesn’t, and get in touch with the targeted audience to collect their valuable opinion.
Today, this article will talk about the definition of In-App surveys, their best practices, and which tools can be used to create them.
Follow me as I show you the way.
What is an In-App Survey?
An In-App Survey is a term used to define a survey included in your user journey to face the customers as they interact with key elements in your product. For instance, when you order clothes or house decoration items online or book an Uber, how often do you see those 5 stars on your screen asking you to rate the service? The answer is probably almost all the time. That’s what an in-app survey is.
Applications like Amazon, Dominos Pizza, or Uber have integrated these app surveys into their service to see off the app users every time they use the product and gather extremely valuable feedback as a result.
And why are in-app surveys important?
Well, here’s your answer.
User research is a critical element of product management. Product owners, managers, or designers who wish to take their product to the next level should be listening to the target audience and closely examining the market to be able to learn first-hand about what people want from them, identify unhappy users and provide user satisfaction in a more sophisticated way.
However, product owners already have a lot on their plates. They obviously don’t have the time to communicate with the target market or every user persona out there and find out about their constantly evolving requirements.
In-app surveys that make it a lot easier to collect user feedback come to the rescue to overcome this inconvenience. These surveys will enable you to enhance the accuracy and the relevance of your decisions and help you create a product that possesses a strong value proposition and offers the requirements of your target audience.
In other words, in-app surveys offer your users a right to speak for themselves at the product development argument.
Everything sounds great so far.
But do in-app surveys actually work?
Do in-app surveys work?
In-App Surveys work for various teams, including customer success, marketing, design & product, in that they’re versatile and sophisticated, and their insights can provide invaluable information -feedback from customers- that’s vital for business growth.
In-app surveys work perfectly when it comes to reducing the number of steps users have to take to finish the survey and removing the obligation for users to leave the application to be able to submit their feedback. Instead, they enable you to keep people in your app and thus increase the possibility of users participating in the survey. This also helps you increase the time spent by your users on your app.
Here are more of those In-App Surveys’ benefits to help you decide if they work well enough.
Benefits of In-App Surveys
In-App Survey responses can help you:
- Prioritize your users.
- Find customer pain points and come up with solutions.
- Think of new ideas for new features.
- Understand and keep track of the user experience roadmap.
- Encourage loyalty among your users and gain five-star reviews from them.
- Identify app usage and digital adoption of particular features.
- Target unsatisfied users and maximize user retention.
- Create a solid pricing strategy.
- Shed light on your user personas.
Let’s now exemplify the excellent practices of In-App Surveys that turned these benefits into an excellent success.
6 Examples of Great In-App Surveys
1- Hubspot
HubSpot is a cloud-based environment that gathers all customer service data and channels into one shared space. The platform is widely loved and used by all businesses thanks to its knowledge base, communicative tools, help A Guide to In-App Surveys: Top Examples and Best Toolsdesk center, in-app surveys, analytics, and more.
Hubspot’s use of in-app surveys is a great example that perfectly conveys how the platform manages to implement a question with space for text comments and feedback entries.
The best part is that users are still using the product without leaving the platform to answer questions instead. This keeps them concentrated and engaged with the service while making them feel that their opinion is valued.
2- Zomato
Yes or no questions are easy to ask. But they can’t always bring the piece of information that you ache for. Asking your users open-ended questions will enable you to gather more information and insights into your user’s experience.
However, typing tons of words on mobile isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. So, it’s crucial to find the balance there.
Here’s how Zomato took care of it.
Zomato is a restaurant search and discovery app with an excellent encouragement strategy that enables users to share their instant opinions.
The app has a profoundly simple, one-line text entry field that seems very easy and quick to handle. An invitation is also included -an email address attachment- for users who wish to send more detailed feedback.
3- Twitter
Another way to collect feedback that’s different from regular pop-ups is to include permanent sections of additional questions within your app. This will make them easily discoverable for your newcomers and save you the time that would otherwise be spent making constant changes or additions.
Let’s now take a look at Twitter‘s permanent surveys and polls in its timeline feed that makes it easy and convenient to collect relevant feedback in a way that doesn’t interfere with the user experience.
4- Nike Run Club
Nike + Run Club is a health and fitness app redesigned back in 2016 to provide better service. It currently ranks #15 in all fitness apps in App Store and has almost 190k reviews and a 4.8-star rating from its happy customers.
What did they do that turned out so great?
The team behind the app decided to respond to all the negative feedback they received via all channels, in-app surveys included.
Put simply, Nike + Run Club has perfectly understood through experience that their users are doing them a favor by letting them know how they feel about the app. Once they realize this, it became much easier to thank their users by sending personal emails or announcing new features that they may like.
When they were on the verge of redesigning, their users were quite unhappy because they were losing personal data or finding new features dissatisfactory. And this was clearly shown in App Store ratings, social media pages, etc.
So what the team did was something remarkable. First, they ensured that almost every social media post and negative review received an in detail response from the team members to show their devotion and willingness to make things better.
Consequently, they set a brilliant example of practicing the art of in-app surveys and collection of user responses and what to do with it!
5- Evernote
Evernote is a free storing app that gives you a break from that constant fear of losing track of your valuables like receipts, to-do lists, boarding passes, articles on your reading list, or just typed notes.
The app is loved and used by many around the world for its compatibility with the Apple Watch and the various shapes and forms it comes with – a desktop application, a website- a browser widget, and a mobile app.-
The platform uses short and straightforward in-app questions to gather specific information from its users to track how well their product is doing.
These questions enabled Evernote to gather more valuable insights and set a great example of progressive disclosure. This method makes sure that users answer a single question to understand the survey quickly and easily, then continue to answer more in-depth questions as a follow-up.
6- Human: Activity Tracker App
Human, the activity tracker, is an iOS app primarily designed to help users stay healthy and on track. The app aims to encourage its users to move daily for 30 mins and make a habit out of it for the long term.
When surveying the users, the app takes on a different approach and asks one or two questions max to boost response rates. This makes it easier for users to answer the questions just by a single click instead of asking them a dozen questions and boring them away.
You can see that the very first question is simply straight to the point and doesn’t cover the whole screen -which can be pretty annoying- and enables the users to respond with a single emoji, making the process both easy and engaging.
The next question enables users to give more detailed feedback if they wish to, but it’s again not mandatory.
Last but not least, the app asks for contact information as a follow-up and lets the users understand that their feedback will be heard & taken into consideration and most probably be answered back.
Now that you know what to aim for, thanks to these excellent examples, let’s take the ”how” out of your way.
Here are the top in-app survey tools to help yoı collect user feedback In-App.
Top Tools to Collect User Feedback In-App
1- UserGuiding – User Onboarding and User Feedback
What do you expect from a tool to help you collect user feedback in-app?
Let me take a guess.
Affordability? User-friendly interface? No coding requirements?
Well, UserGuiding has it all.
To help you collect feedback from your users and provide a better customer experience as a result, UserGuiding lets you create personalized and customizable in-app surveys that make a difference.
First of all, UserGuiding is more affordable when compared to its competitors, who provide the same service with different paid plans ranging from Beginner to Enterprise level.
Secondly, UserGuiding requires no coding skills at all, unlike many user onboarding tools out there that claim to be no-code but still require a significant amount of technical knowledge to complete the process. On the contrary, UserGuiding is here for the no-code future where everybody -from a non-expert to a professional developer- gets to experience the same value.
Here’s an example to show you how UserGuiding helps you achieve what you have in mind.
Meet TimeSlov.
TimeSolv is a time tracking and billing solution that has been around since 1999.
They were in search for a tool to help them move their communications channels with their users to inside their product through in-app messages, surveys, and announcements – all of which are achievable with UserGuiding.
In addition to many in-app elements provided by the platform, Timesolv was able to increase their survey completions up to%10 just by switching to in-app surveys instead of email ones.
Don’t you think it’s your turn to get the hang of these brilliant in-app surveys and see what they can do for you now?
Work is digital and remote now, so how do I collect feedback?
You could be reading this from your home, from the nearest coffee shop, or from the beachside (🤫 we all did it).
And. we all know that all users are looking for the fastest and easiest way in-and-out of anything nowadays – including your product.
The same goes for feedback.
Not everyone is comfortable with sharing what they want to say on a long google form or through long customer success calls.
Don’t worry.
We made this process easier for both you and your users.
UserGuiding now offers advanced (but easy-to-use) surveying capabilities.
With UserGuiding, you can not only onboard and engage new and existing users faster and easier, but you can also collect any kind of feedback and conduct any kind of survey easily.
Do you need how your users found the new feature?
Ask them through UserGuiding’s star rating survey, or thumbs up-down survey, along with a feedback question.
Do you need to know how satisfied they are with the initial user journey and onboarding?
Let them rate it through 1-5, 1-10, or multiple choice surveys right on the tab they have open.
Make the questions and the feedback system accessible everywhere, on their onboarding checklist, on the resource center, or directly on the screen.
UserGuiding’s price starts from $89/month for all features and fast customer support.
2- Typeform
Typeform is here to change your mind about creating a survey and thinking of the process as if it’s a boring assignment you need to complete. Actually quite the opposite, it makes the process clear, comfortable, and intuitive thanks to its user-friendly interface that’s simple to master.
The platform’s builder works like a digital sketchbook where you decide on your question types and take a simultaneous look at the live view of how your survey has turned out so far.
On the side of the screen, you pick questions from a vertical bar which helps keep the page clean and appealing to the eye.
The tool runs smoothly on all devices and is incredibly versatile in that it provides excellent tools both for designing and collecting data and comes with a ton of design options, templates, and question types that you can choose from to suit your survey the best.
Pricing
Typeform has three separate plans, which are Basic, Plus, and Business.
The Basic plan is for 25 USD per month with up to 100 responses, while the Plus plan is for double price and with 1.000 responses per month.
The Business plan is 83 USD per month with 10.000 responses per month.
3- SurveySparrow
SurveySparrow is another great survey tool that lets businesses of all sizes create and share engaging in-app surveys via various channels and comes with built-in automation, making the process much easier and smoother.
The online platform also differentiates itself from its competitors in that it offers a conversational interface – a chat-like survey experience- and this creates an opportunity to transform the idea of traditional surveys into a more engaging and appealing tool. As soon as you get started with SurveySparrow, you get to choose the survey type – classic, chat, NPS, 360 degree, or offline surveys- you wish to use according to your need.
Pricing
The tool offers a free version in which you can create up to 10 questions and receive up to 100 responses per month.
Nonetheless, if you wish to go for more advanced features, there are paid plans that you can choose from starting at 19 dollars per month.
4- SurveyKiwi
SurveyKiwi is a gamified online survey platform primarily designed and built to create interactive and customizable surveys. The tool is wildly loved and used in that it has a user-friendly interface which makes it effortless for any user to form an entire survey in just a few minutes and share them via QR code, embed the HTML, and/or share it to social media platforms such as Facebook or Twitter.
The tool also provides ease of use when it comes to uploading images and designing personal templates, adding questions, and much more. Furthermore, the cloud-based SAAS platform is especially great for personal use since it allows 100 respondents per survey.
However, if you’re looking for more advanced features such as more monthly responses, unlimited questions, or unlimited workspaces, then the paid plans starting at 9 dollars a month would suit you better.
Pricing
The Bronze plan, which allows you to have up to 100 responses per month, is $9.
The Silver plan is $39 per month with up to 1000 responses.
And the Gold plan with up to 10.000 responses is $69 per month.
5- Google Forms
Google Forms is one of the best free online survey tools out there that enables you to gather surveys very fast and easily, thanks to its convenient drag and drop interface. With this tool, you can customize the design of the surveys and receive real-time response information and charts.
It’s also worth mentioning that Google Forms enables the collected data to be synced with other Google products meaning that you can gather everything in a spreadsheet and analyze your data in Google Sheet, which is convenient.
With Google Forms, you can create many in-app elements such as free polls, pop quizzes, and surveys. The platform also saves you time by offering free templates to jumpstart the survey design process.
And for those who like to stay organized, I should mention that Google Forms stores and manages data appropriately to stay organized and on track. This is an important aspect of creating in-app surveys since so many people join these surveys and give tons of different responses, which require a proper environment to stay safe. With Google Forms, you don’t have to lose sleep over this minor issue since the tool lets you link the survey with Google Sheets -as mentioned before- and automatically save it to your selected files. You can reach, change and resave this data anytime you like.
6- Survey Monkey
The last one to conclude this list with is SurveyMonkey. I’m sure you’re familiar with the name. SurveyMonkey is one of the most popular online survey tools out there, and it has its reasons if you’re wondering why.
SurveyMonkey has a lot to offer. To begin with, it has user-friendly onboarding, which makes it easy for users to get started with the tool. Then, after the first impression, the users are provided with plenty of options ranging from picking survey templates to transforming surveys into a chat conversation. The tool’s unique features also make it easier for first-timers to collect data online and offline through mobile devices and let them generate reports, analyze and back up survey data easily.
As for the designing part, things still don’t get too complicated. SurveyMonkey gives you access to pre-made questions gathered from real surveys and does you a favor with its AI-enhanced editor that can guess the question type that best suits your survey based on your content.
Pricing
SurveyMonkey offers four pricing plans which are Basic, Standard Monthly, Advantage Annual, and Premier Annual.
The Basic plan is free with a limit of 10 questions per survey, while the Standard Monthly plan costs 99 dollars per month with unlimited questions and 1000 responses per month.
The Advantage Annual plan costs 32 dollars per month with unlimited questions and 5000 responses per year.
The Premier Annual plan is 99 dollars per month with unlimited questions and 7.500 responses per year.
Final Word
I hope this article helped you understand what in-app surveys are and enabled you to examine its best practices for inspiration.
Let’s catch up another time!
Frequently Asked Questions
How do you get feedback for an app?
To get valuable feedback for an app, there are in-app elements that you can try. In-app surveys do a great job of enhancing the relevance of your business decisions and the steps you take to provide a better user experience. These surveys will aid you in creating an app that has a strong value proposition and provides the requirements of your target audience.
Here is a list of the best tools to help you collect user feedback:
- UserGuiding
- SurveyMonkey
- Google Forms
- Typeform
- Survey Kiwi
- SurveySparrow
Is survey on the go legit?
Surveys on the go provide ask for users’ opinions on particular features of a product/app or service as the user is on the verge of experiencing the product. This makes these surveys highly relevant and helpful in collecting feedback to help product teams evaluate the answers and take action accordingly. And yes, these surveys are legit in terms of trustability and credibility.
