3 ms·

One aspect that I always worry about surveys is that there is tremendous self-selection when it comes to who chooses to send time taking the survey. I also have

One aspect that I always worry about surveys is that there is tremendous self-selection when it comes to who chooses to send time taking the survey. I also have a survey put up at Visual Website Optimizer and never for once I got a negative feedback. That may be because the product is awesome but more likely it is because the users to choose to invest time answering the survey already like the product and want to pay back to me in terms of their time. What is more valuable to me is feedback from people who hated the product, but irked them and what can I fix. Getting those people to fill the survey is, not surprisingly, really hard. Patrick, what is your opinion on this? Do you worry about self-selection too?

patio11 17y ago
Self selection worries me a little bit, but I try to focus my worrying on things I can change rather than things I cannot. I got a lot more helpful negative feedback by surveying users than I do by my typical approach of sitting by the email box waiting for someone to complain. That is enough reason to do the survey for me. Of course, test and measure to supplement the feedback people give you with data on what they actually do. If they say "DON'T CHANGE A THING!" and your data says only 5% of users come back, time to fix.