User Survey
A user survey is a structured questionnaire used to collect feedback from users about their experience, satisfaction, expectations, or opinions regarding a software product.
“A usability evaluation whereby a representative sample of users are asked to report subjective evaluation into a questionnaire based on their experience in using a component or system.”
(Definition reproduced from the ISTQB Glossary. Copyright belongs to ISTQB.)
View the complete ISTQB GlossaryWhat is User Survey?
Survey results help organizations identify strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities for improving usability and user experience.
Feedback collection: Gathers opinions from many users.
Quantitative and qualitative data: Supports informed decisions.
Improvement focused: Identifies trends and user needs.
Real World Example
After a redesign of a food delivery app's order-tracking screen, the team wants to know how real customers feel about the change, not just whether they can complete an order.
Task completion metrics from a usability lab session show people can still place orders, but they say nothing about whether customers actually find the new screen confusing, cluttered, or genuinely better than before — that's a subjective judgment, not a pass/fail task outcome.
The team runs a User survey: distributing a structured questionnaire to a representative sample of real users after they've used the redesigned tracking screen, asking them to rate clarity, trust in the delivery estimate, and overall satisfaction in their own words.
The responses reveal that most users don't trust the new estimated-arrival display even though it's technically more accurate than the old one — a perception issue only a User survey could surface, since nothing about it would show up as a failed task or a functional defect.
Practice Questions
Question 1
After a redesign, a team finds that users can still complete their tasks in a usability lab session, but wants to know whether users actually feel the new screen is better than before. Which technique MOST directly answers that question?
Question 2
Which finding could a user survey reveal that a task-completion-based usability test would likely miss?
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