I have just finished the final touches on a user survey for a large enterprise web application that I help manage. This application has not had a user survey in two years and I’m looking forward to seeing the differences between our assumptions and the actual practice of our user community.

Here are some tips when conducting a user survey:

• Put the survey online and put in a call to action right off your site or application. Don’t relay on emails or worse yet paper surveys.
• Make the call to action visible upon log in. I use a model dialogs to present the survey, but with a clear ability to opt out.
• To achieve a higher participation rate, make the user see a modal dialog every time they initially log into the app/site for the course of the survey. Of course remove the appearance of the modal dialog if the survey has already been taken. I know some find this annoying or obtrusive, but I have had quite a bit of success with this approach.
• Keep the survey running around 4-6 weeks.
• Have about 10 questions and have no more than 3 text area boxes. Everything else should be either drop downs, check boxes, or radios with no more than 4 options each.