The Best User Feedback Questions For Improving Any Website in 2022

Discover essential questions to get better feedback from your visitors and create high-impact ideas for improving your website

(Newly updated for 2023 based on my most recent experiences)

One of the best ways to improve any website is becoming much more visitor and customer focused, and discover their main issues, pain points, doubts, hesitations and needs.

Insights from their feedback helps you create higher-impact website improvement ideas, and this form of conversion research is an essential part of effective conversion rate optimization (CRO). And gives much higher impact than simply guessing or going off gut feeling what to improve, or worse still, listening to what your HiPPO wants to do.

There are many great tools like UserFeel and Hotjar that enable you to easily gather this essential feedback, but they are often setup quickly without knowing how to maximize insights gained from them.

As with many website tools, if you put junk in, you will get junk out. In this case, if you use questions or tasks that are poor, you won’t get good insights.

In this article I reveal the key questions and tasks you should use to gain the best feedback from your visitors and target audience.

The best questions and tasks for user testing

There are many excellent user testing tools that enable you to ask your website visitors and target audience key tasks and questions, and watch them try to complete them on your website, and hear their answers.

I recommend UserFeel because they offer similar features to UserTesting, but at a much lower cost. You can also get an exclusive 10% off.

Here are some really important tasks and questions you should ask to ensure you get the most actionable and high-impact feedback and insights:

• Go to website ‘X’. What are your first impressions of this website?
  This is important to find out because visitors can often judge your whole website within just 5 seconds.
• Do you feel there is anything unique about what this website offers?
  This is essential for seeing if you are highlighting your unique value proposition well enough.
• Try to find information about ‘X’.
  Mention finding a product, service or information important for your visitors to find or know about- essential for seeing how easy they find this.
• Please use the navigation or internal search to find something you are interested in. How useful were these options? This helps you understand how good your navigation is, because you need to ensure both of these help visitors find exactly what they want as quickly as possible.
• Add a product to your cart and start the checkout process. How easy does the checkout process seem? How trustworthy does it seem?
  This is essential for learning about issues regarding your all-important checkout process — it is vital to fix these quickly.
• What are the key factors that influence your purchase decision?
  Maybe you aren’t showing enough prominent information about one of the key factors that influence their purchase. Don’t just presume you know.
• What are your biggest doubts or hesitations about this website? This is one of the most important questions as knowing this will help you understand what content or risk reducers need adding to reduce their concerns and get them purchasing more often.
• Would you have purchased from this website? If not, why not?
  This is a good summary question to use towards the end of the user test, and often helps user testers to summarize their main issues.
• What would increase the chances of you purchasing, other than reducing price or using discounts?
  This is a good open ended question to see what else visitors would like to see on your website that would help them decide to purchase.
• Please try to find a similar website in Google, visit it and describe what (if anything) you prefer on that website.
  This is a great question to ask at the end and helps you understand what other websites they might use, and what they like about them. Great for finding website improvement ideas.

To get the best results it is also very important to always select your target audience demographics and pre-screener questions for your testers. For example, must be between 25–45, female, based in the USA, and must have previously purchased luxury clothing online. If you don’t do this, you will not get very good and actionable insights to use for improving your website.

You should get 5 user tests on desktop and 5 user tests on mobile, as both of devices have their own problems and issues that you will need to improve. Studies have shown this amount will reveal the most common issues.

To encourage good feedback and reduce the chances of user testers being too positive or eager to please, you also need to write a good introduction (scenario) that asks for suggestions and honest feedback, something like this:
‘Please be honest with your feedback and give suggestions for improvement’.

The best questions to use for visitor surveys

To gain more high-impact feedback you need to survey your website visitors. This will help you understand what their most common feedback and issues which you can use to create high-impact website improvement ideas.

To ensure the highest level of insight ask these questions in particular:

• What are your first impressions of this page?
  This simple question is important to ask because visitors often judge whole websites very quickly based on what they first see.
• Do you have any doubts or hesitations about our website or products?
  Asking this is good for understanding if there are any trust or credibility issues in particular.
• Is there anything stopping you from purchasing right now?
  This is one of the most important questions to gain insights from, and is good for using on pricing, product or service pages.
• What would increase the chances of you purchasing, other than reducing price or using discounts?
  Asking this will help you understand if there is anything you could be offering or improving, and is very important for ecommerce sites.
• What are the key factors that influence your purchase decision?
  When you find out what these key factors are you can improve your website and offerings to better influence your visitors.

This is a really good multiple choice question that will help you quickly understand what their most common types of issues are:

• Do any of these apply to you?

- I can’t find what I’m looking for (if so, what can’t you find?)
- I don’t understand something (if so, what don’t you understand?)
- I have a problem (if, so what problem do you have?)
- Products are out of my price range
- I’m not ready to buy yet
- None of the above

The first 3 options should show a comment box that allows them to answer.

When to best show survey popups

When showing a visitor survey popup on your website, it is best to wait several minutes before asking for feedback, and not asking them immediately. You will annoy visitors if you pop it up too soon — you need them to have used your website first for them to be able to give good feedback. The best way to do it is making the popup only trigger after they have at least seen a product or services page.

Incentive responses to get more results

To get more resultsNone of the above by giving visitors a chance to a win a gift certificate if they respond. I recommend offering a chance to win a $50 gift certificate either for your website or for Amazon.com. Offering the chance to win a higher incentive amount gets much better response rates than offering a small amount to everyone who responds.

You should also limit this visitor survey to 5 questions or you will get a much lower response completion rate. Ideally you need 100 responses from this survey to get enough insights.

Maximium the quality of your feedback

To get feedback that gives you better ideas and insights you need to give the prize to the person who gives the most useful feedback — not just give it away at random. Otherwise you will get people giving minimal feedback as they only really care about winning the prize This messaging has increased the quality of responses significantly every time I have used it:

“You could win a $50 Amazon gift card if you give us the best or most useful feedback.”

The best questions to use for customer surveys

Customers are extremely important to survey as they have been through the whole visitor journey and purchased, so will have the most useful feedback. In particular they will know what nearly stopped them purchasing.

Instead of just using them to ask questions about your product or customer survey experience you need to ask them questions about their website experience. To ensure greater insights from your customer surveys, here are some good questions to get high-impact feedback:

• Was there anything that nearly stopped you from purchasing?
  This is one of the most revealing questions you can ask, and the answers will help you improve your website to fix issues for potential customers.
• What did you think of your experience on our website?
  A good open ended question that can reveal insights about many things.
• Was it easy to order our product (or service)? How easy was the checkout (or signup) process?
  This question is essential for finding insights about improving your checkout or signup pages — and quickly fixing these.
• Was there any missing information that would have been helpful to know before you purchased?
  Maybe you aren’t making key things very clear or prominent on your website. This question helps you discover what information needs adding.
• What were the key factors that influenced your purchase decision for this type of product (or service)?
  This question will help you understand what details your potential customers will want to see most prominently on your website.
• Did you consider using any other websites before purchasing from us? Did you prefer anything about them?
  This is question is great for gaining insights from competitor websites.

You would need to setup this survey and then email it to your customers with an engaging subject line to increase the chances of them opening it.

You should also encourage customers to respond by offering gift cards. I suggest offering a $20 gift certificate (either for your website or for Amazon.com) for anyone who responds to the survey. As with visitor surveys, offering the chance to win a higher incentive amount for the best feedback gets a much better response than offering a small amount to all respondents.

Ideally you need at least 50 responses to gain enough insights, but that will depend on how large your customer list is. And if customers don’t respond to your email, you can resend to the people who didn’t open the email with a increased incentive.

Wrapping up

The next time you create a user test or survey for your website, use some of these questions and tasks, in addition to the ones you have planned. You will gain much better insights that you can use to create higher impact website improvement ideas or A/B tests.

Hopefully you find these visitor feedback questions very useful. Comments, applause and shares for this article would be highly appreciated!

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