Website redesign survey questions to improve your UX

Your website is like your online home base. It shapes how people see your brand, gets them interested, and helps turn them into customers.

Just like how your sales team needs regular training, your website needs regular check-ups and updates to keep it working smoothly. If you notice problems, like lots of people leaving items in their carts or more folks bouncing off your site on mobile, it might be time for a makeover to fix those issues.

During this process, it’s important to think about what you want to achieve with the redesign. A big part of figuring that out comes from asking the people who use your site what they think. They can give you awesome ideas for making your site even better!

In this article, we’ll talk about the questions you should be asking as you get ready to give your website a fresh look.

Before you start asking customers for their feedback, you’ll need to ask yourself a few questions. These questions will help guide the process and provide structure for your design decisions.

1. Who is my target audience, and what are their needs and preferences?

Understanding your audience is key to a successful redesign. Consider their demographics, such as age, location, and interests. You should also understand their online behaviors.

When you know your audience’s needs and preferences, you can tailor the redesign to better meet their expectations, ultimately improving user experience and engagement.

2. What are the primary goals and objectives of my website, including SEO optimization?

In addition to defining goals such as increasing sales or generating leads, it’s crucial to consider the redesign’s impact on your current search engine rankings.

A poorly executed redesign could potentially undo previous SEO efforts, resulting in a setback in search rankings.

We recommend involving an experienced SEO specialist to assess the website and provide guidance on mitigating any adverse effects during the redesign process.

3. What are the current pain points and areas for improvement on my existing website?

Identify your current website’s shortcomings by analyzing user feedback, metrics, and usability testing results. Look for common issues such as slow load times, confusing navigation, or outdated content.

Addressing key pain points in the redesign will enhance user satisfaction and drive better results. Look at what your competitors are doing well and research industry best practices.

4. How can I ensure designers, developers, and stakeholders are aligned throughout the redesign process?

When essential team members and stakeholders aren’t on the same page, it can lead to misunderstandings, project delays, and disappointing outcomes.

Establishing clear communication channels, setting common goals, and fostering collaboration are essential to keep everyone aligned.

Prioritize the target audience’s preferences and needs in decision-making and consider your business goals. This will enable you to ensure the redesign resonates with intended users and propels your business forward.

5. What is my budget and timeline for the redesign project?

Consider factors such as design and development costs, as well as the time required for implementation and testing.

Assessing your resources in terms of budget and timeline is essential for planning a realistic redesign. Setting clear budgetary and scheduling parameters will help manage expectations and ensure a smooth redesign process.

In addition to the insights you gain from the process above, you’ll need to look at a few standard areas of investigation before your website redesign.

Determining SMART goals

When undertaking any project, it’s helpful to set up SMART goals to track progress and measure success.

“SMART” stands for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. Creating goals that meet each of those criteria makes it easy to monitor progress.

For a website redesign, examine how the goals of the redesign align with your overall business goals and determine the specific metrics you’ll use to track them.

Setting benchmarks

Once you have set your smart goals and you know which metrics you’ll be using, such as bounce rate and conversion rate, you can begin to set some benchmarks for improvement.

Compare how well your current website compares to competitors in terms of the metrics you’re using. This will give you the best areas to focus on and provide a benchmark for measuring improvement.

Understanding the site requirements

Ensure the site achieves its intended goals by laying out its requirements in full. Examine how the redesigned website will better serve your target audience’s needs and then decide on the new features or functionalities that will be required to make that happen.

A clear, well-designed set of requirements can help prevent scope creep in the future and deliver a more successful final result.

Website functionality

With the requirements in place, you can begin to flesh out aspects of the site’s functionality. For instance, you’ll need to determine how you’ll ensure that the navigation is intuitive and user-friendly. You should also put a plan in place to make the entire website SEO-friendly.

Create a list of the functionalities you’ll need and use that as part of the development roadmap.

Setting up a lead generation process

The lead generation process is an important part of the website’s functionality. If you create a stunning new website but it doesn’t generate leads as well as the previous one, you’ve missed the mark on the redesign.

Look for ways to facilitate a smoother lead generation process, but also make sure to keep any aspects of the current site that perform well. 

Building relationships

Your website is the portal through which your audience interacts with your brand. As you build out the design, think of ways that your website can help you build or improve relationships with visitors.

Audience feedback is important—not just for the redesign but for many business decisions. How will your site encourage users to engage with the content and provide feedback?

Managing content

There are two aspects of content management to consider when redesigning a site. The first is how you’ll transfer existing content over to the new site. How easy this is depends on how the redesign is structured, so this is an important consideration.

When the redesign is live, the next question is how you plan on updating and maintaining fresh content to keep the audience interested.

You’re almost ready to begin the process of gathering feedback from users to further refine your redesign plans. But first, you need to know where to gather that feedback from.

To some extent, this is unique to your business. You want to use the channels your audience is most likely to use. But there are plenty of general guidelines to help you know where to start.

• Onsite survey and feedback widgets: these can prompt visitors for their opinions while they navigate your site. Keep them as unobtrusive as possible to avoid annoying the visitor.

• Email surveys: an email survey can be particularly effective right after a visitor has interacted with your site. It’s a way to get meaningful thoughts about the process while they’re fresh on the visitor’s mind.

• Social media: don’t forget to ask for feedback on the social media channels your company uses. This is especially important for any channel that receives a lot of engagement as you’ll have plenty of followers already primed to provide feedback.

• Usability testing sessions: you can set up live or remote usability testing sessions to get a deep understanding of how visitors interact with your site. They will also enable you to gain direct feedback about the changes you plan on making and the state of your existing site.

• Analytics: the analytics you’re already collecting on your site can provide plenty of meaningful information. They can reveal problems with messaging, poor navigation flow, and much more. If you don’t have analytics, it could be worth setting them up and collecting data while you’re gathering other sources of feedback.

As you plan your feedback acquisition strategy, be sure to include a mix of quantitative and qualitative feedback mechanisms. This will help you develop a well-rounded view of your website’s current performance and impact.

Now it’s time to decide which survey questions you’ll ask site visitors and existing customers. To do that, you need to know which aspects of your site you need feedback on and why they’re important. Your choice of questions will depend largely on your goals and the areas where you’re still unclear about the best path forward.

Asking users questions about the topics below, including navigation, accessibility, and calls to action, will equip you with key information ahead of planning your redesign. These topics are grouped into four categories:

1. Strategy

2. Copy

3. UI and UX design

4. Development

Strategy

Are your target personas’ needs and pain points current and clear?

One effective strategy in business involves creating user personas tailored to your target audience. These personas act like virtual people who represent your intended audience.

However, market dynamics are constantly shifting, and the needs, wants, and pain points of a persona created in the past may no longer be relevant in the present. Ensure your personas are up-to-date by revisiting the questions you asked when you first created them.

Is your product’s unique value communicated clearly?

When a visitor comes to your site, your product’s unique value proposition (UVP) should be immediately obvious to them. It should be a prominent part of your website as it’s what will set you apart from competitors.

Give survey participants your UVP and ask them if they were aware of it. If not, the redesign will need to focus on presenting the UVP to site visitors.

Some questions you might include are:

• Were you able to clearly identify our product’s unique value proposition when you visited our site?

• How would you describe our product/service’s primary benefit or advantage based on the information provided on our website?

• Did our value proposition resonate with you and influence your perception of our brand?

Are your forms and lead tools optimized for conversion?

Poor conversion rates can be the fault of forms and lead capture tools that aren’t as streamlined as they could be. These elements of your site should be intuitive, minimally invasive, and strategically placed.

Ask visitors if these elements of your site are easy to find and painless to use. Sometimes, even a little friction is enough to cost you a sale.

Are you using the right keywords to drive organic traffic?

Asking visitors how they found you and which search terms they used to do so can be a big help in determining whether or not you’re focusing on the right keywords.

You can also ask your customers to describe your product in their own words or ask them what keywords they use more broadly when searching for the type of product or services you sell.

Is the website’s navigation intuitive and user-friendly?

A website with good navigation guides visitors to the information they seek without causing confusion or frustration. Poorly structured navigation can increase bounce rates and decrease user satisfaction.

Ask visitors whether they find the website’s navigation intuitive and straightforward to uncover navigational hurdles you can improve on.

Copy

Do your headlines and subheadings convey value?

One of the goals of headlines and subheadings is to grab the reader’s attention and let them know that the rest of the content on the page is worth engaging with. If they don’t achieve this goal, your user won’t bother to read the page. You’ll get a higher bounce rate—not a higher conversion rate.

Ask visitors if these elements of your site grab their attention and clearly communicate the benefits of engaging with the content.

Does your content persuasively highlight the benefits of your product’s features?

Great headlines will get visitors to read the page, but that’s only the first step to getting a conversion. The next thing you have to do is craft content that convinces visitors to become customers by making a purchase.

Ask visitors if the content on your pages resonates with their needs and convinces them to consider purchasing from you. Follow up by asking which adjustments would make the content more compelling.

Is there a consistent tone of voice throughout your website’s text?

Like your branding, the tone of voice throughout your website’s text should be consistent. If your website doesn’t present a unified voice and style across all its content, it can confuse or distract from the user experience.

Simply asking users whether or not they perceive a unified voice will help you determine whether you need to work on this area of content when writing copy for the redesign.

A copyeditor can help you achieve a consistent tone of voice and style.

How well does your site address potential questions or concerns from your audience?

When a visitor comes to a site, they will have certain questions or concerns. You’ll need to alleviate these before they’re willing to make a purchase.

If your content doesn’t answer these questions for them, they will quickly leave your site and move on to a competitor that does provide them with the information they need.

Ask users how easily they find the information they need and describe any gaps that may exist.

Do clear CTAs guide users toward your conversion goals?

The call to action (CTA) is a crucial part of driving visitors to take your desired action. The more effective your CTA, the more users will complete the action.

Ask visitors how compelling they find the CTAs on your site and what you could do to make them more likely to follow through.

You can also get some clues about the site’s usability from how users currently interact with the CTA and the extent to which they do the desired action. You might get better results by optimizing the CTA’s wording and placement, among other things.

UI and UX design

Does your website’s design distinguish your brand from competitors?

Your website needs to distinguish your brand from your competitors to win over more visitors.

Ask visitors about their perception of your website in comparison to the competition. This will let you know how much work you need to do to set yourself apart more effectively. You’ll also gain insights into how you can do that.

How well does your website use visual elements to demonstrate your product?

Visual elements, like videos, screenshots, and screen recordings, are becoming a much bigger part of the website experience. Visitors want to see product demonstrations, learn about how they work, and discover the benefits they provide in more depth. They don’t want to have to read walls of text to uncover useful information.

Videos and screenshots are great tools for enabling this. Ask users how well your existing media showcases your products or services and how you can improve it to better address their questions.

Is your website compliant with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG)?

Many of your site’s visitors will rely on assistive technologies to browse it. Others may be unable to see certain colors, read smaller fonts, or carry out other tasks on the website.

Asking users if they have any problems with your site’s accessibility is vital for ensuring fair access to all. This will help you identify areas for improvement in accessibility that you might have overlooked or not even been aware of.

Does your website adhere to design best practices?

When designing a website, you should always try to adhere to design best practices. It’s easy to let some of these concepts slip through the cracks. You might inadvertently introduce aspects of the website that make it less intuitive, user-friendly, and aesthetically pleasing.

Ask visitors specifically about how your site’s design and layout compare to similar sites that they have visited. This can highlight missed opportunities for a great design.

Are there design elements on your site that could be simplified or eliminated to enhance user experience?

Reducing friction is an important aspect of increasing conversions. Nobody wants to come to a site and have to click five times for what other sites allow them to accomplish in two clicks.

Feedback from users on this topic can help you identify areas for simplification that might not have been immediately obvious to you. This can make your redesign cleaner and more straightforward with a stronger focus on essential elements and functionality.

Development

Does your website adapt seamlessly across mobile, tablet, and desktop devices?

Responsive design is a major part of creating an effective modern website. Most users browse websites on mobile devices, and search engines actively punish sites that are not mobile-friendly.

With so many mobile devices out there, it can be hard to ensure your site looks perfect on all of them. That’s why user feedback can be so helpful. Ask users how your site performs on their devices to highlight areas where you may need to make adjustments to ensure a smooth and consistent user experience.

How effectively does your website integrate with your technology stack?

Modern websites often integrate with third-party services. Ideally, this will be a seamless experience that site visitors aren’t even aware of. Many of these services even provide custom branding opportunities. Visitors don’t realize they are interacting with a different company’s tools.

If you use services such as these, ask users about their experience in dealing with them. If there are issues, be prepared to address them or find a provider that eliminates them.

Are search engines indexing your web pages effectively?

Search engines provide tools that allow you to see how well each of your pages is performing. But the page ranking doesn’t necessarily tell the whole picture. The way your listing is displayed on the results page can have a big impact on whether or not people click on it.

Ask visitors who found you through search engines about their experience. This can help you craft better metadata for search engines to use when creating your listing.

Has website load time impacted the browsing experience?

This is another area that’s important to both users and search engines alike. Because users are likely to bounce if a page takes too long to load, search engines punish slow-loading sites.

If you have any slow-loading pages, it’s especially important to ask users how that load time impacts their willingness to wait. A general question about how acceptable your load times are can also be helpful in reducing bounce rates.

Do your website’s security measures instill confidence in users?

With cybersecurity becoming a bigger problem, many internet users are becoming more aware of security issues that may put their data at risk. A perception of poor security could scare users away.

Ask your website visitors about their perception of security on your site. You might ask questions about data protection practices or any concerns they might have about privacy.

Understanding user sentiments about security can highlight areas for improvement, helping you establish greater trust with your audience.