Sarah Doody on YouTube · Open on YouTube
Systems and research depth · Proficient · Lesson 69 of 99 · 27 min video, then about 3 hours of practice
Surveys and quantitative research without fooling yourself
After this you can design a survey whose answers you can trust, know when a quantitative method is the right one, and size a study sensibly.
Why it matters
Surveys are the most abused method in product work: easy to send, easy to write badly, and easy to over-interpret. Learn to write neutral, single-concept questions, to avoid asking people to predict their own behaviour, to pilot before launching, and to report with the sample and its biases stated. More broadly, learn what quantitative UX research is for (measuring how much and how many, benchmarking, comparing) and why it needs far larger samples than qualitative work. Trap: treating a survey as a substitute for observation. What people say they do and what they do diverge, reliably.
How to use this resource
A step-by-step guide to building a research survey from goal to questions to analysis, from a long-time UX educator. Published 2020; survey method does not date.