Qualaroo on Mobile Web - Best Practices and Considerations

Are you seeking feedback from users who visit your website on their mobile devices? This article covers helpful tips and tricks to ensure you pick the right insights from your audiences using the Mobile Web survey add-on available with Qualaroo. 

What’s the big deal with mobile web anyway?

You don’t need us to tell you that the prevalence of mobile technology is a global phenomenon. You’ve likely experienced that moment where you look up and realize everyone around you is on the phone. If you’re still somehow not convinced, though, here are the numbers: 

In the fourth quarter of 2021, mobile devices generated 54.4 percent of global website traffic. That means more than half of all internet traffic comes from cell phones, which doesn’t even include tablets! 

Percentage of all global web pages served to mobile phones from Q1 2015 to Q4 2021

Graph via Statista

So what does this mean for businesses? According to Google’s Consumer Insights division, 58% of users are more inclined toward companies whose mobile sites or apps remember them and their past behavior. Hence, offering a personalized experience is the key.

But once they’re on your website...things get a little tricky. 

While cell phones are the leading devices for internet usage, they also tend to have the highest bounce rate. When it comes to the desktop versus mobile debate, consumers will only visit almost half as many pages on mobile as they would on the desktop for roughly half the amount of time.

So we’re saying that when it comes to mobile web, you’ll have to deal with smaller attention spans and less real estate for site visitors, who most likely make up the most significant portion of your audience! Your mobile response rate probably makes a little more sense in this context.

But don’t worry! All this information we’re giving you about mobile usage and behavior will help you design more innovative surveys!

Things to Keep in Mind

How can we optimize for mobile environments?

You can keep in mind a few things to increase your mobile response rate. As a general rule of thumb, the following considerations should apply to every user research project you do. However, this white paper will detail how you can optimize each element for a mobile survey environment.

• Goals
  • What is the goal of your questions?
  • Are you trying to solve a problem or answer a specific question?

• Survey composition 
  • What insights are you looking for?
  • What do you want to find out?
  • What do you need to ask?

• Targeting
  • Who can provide the insights you’re looking for? And do you have a way to track these people?  
  • Is there a specific persona you are targeting? 
  • Do you need to ask questions to specific site visitors or to users who are already logged in?

• Design
  • How can you make the survey experience seamless?
  • How do you want your survey to feel for the respondent?

What are your goals?

Why are you interested in creating a mobile web survey? What are you hoping to accomplish? 

Perhaps your team noticed that conversion for mobile visitors has recently dropped, and you’re trying to understand why this is happening. Maybe you just redesigned your mobile site and need to validate usability and functionality. 

Whatever this goal might be, it will inform everything else you do when conducting user research. Imagine trying to improve overall mobile conversion rates, but you place a survey right before a customer was going to checkout to ask about their shopping experience. This type of distracting placement could prevent them from actually purchasing something from your website! 

Your user research program should align with your goals rather than distract from them. Keep your end goal in mind and ask yourself if your survey composition, targeting, and survey design support or detract from your feedback goals every step of the way.

Survey Composition

Remember how we said that mobile means more visitors with shorter attention spans and less space to capture their attention? It makes survey composition one of the most crucial elements to consider. The way you phrase and structure questions must be compelling and concise. 

Here’s what you can do to make sure you’re on the right track: 

Begin with a question that’s quick to answer

To encourage a higher response rate, we recommend beginning mobile web surveys with questions and answer options that allow for a quick reply. We recommend starting with one of the following answer options for mobile: Radio Button, Net Promoter Score, or Check Box. These options require less effort from the user and generally help increase your Nudge’s response rate. 

Follow up with a specific question that captures your user’s voice

Once you ask your initial question, we recommend catering your following questions to be specific to the user. Radio Button and NPS answer options allow you to branch to appropriate subsequent questions based on the respondent’s initial sentiment. Branching logic provides an excellent opportunity to ask a question that requires a freeform text option, which can help you capture your user’s voice.

Keep it short, and prioritize

We recommend only asking 1-3 questions within any given Mobile Survey to avoid survey fatigue. Keep your questions and answer options as concise as possible while remaining clear. In addition, make sure you order your questions based on priority and place the most important questions at the front of the question flow. 

Opt-in options  

If you want to give each user an option to opt-in before taking your survey, you have several options at your disposal. The first option is to use The Mobile Screener, which provides a smaller window housing a brief description and a button to proceed to the survey. Another option is a question screen with one radio button answer option. With this option, you can prepare a question like “Are you willing to answer a few questions to help us improve?” coupled with one radio button option similar to “Yes.” If the user is uninterested in providing feedback, they can simply close the window.

Beginning your survey with an opt-in option can help increase the responses to questions positioned later in the survey but can hurt your overall response rate. It is simply because the respondent is using their first action to opt-in or out of your survey instead of responding. 

Targeting Methods

Be intentional

We recommend being very intentional with where, when, and to whom your Mobile Survey appears on site. 

Where

Use Advanced URL Targeting to target or altogether avoid specific locations on your website. It can help you quickly avoid areas that may impact critical metrics such as sign-up or payment journeys. This feature can also help you quickly target things like your Dashboard or Confirmation pages.

Who

Custom Property Targeting is an excellent way to ensure only the right users are prompted for feedback. It can help increase the quantity and quality of your responses by ensuring your questions are relevant. For example, you can target only users who leverage a particular feature set or have a specific usage pattern. You can also target users based on any Persona information available within your data layer.

Whitelisting and Blacklisting Users from Seeing Your Nudge is also an effective strategy for ensuring only users that you have preselected will either see or avoid seeing your survey.

When

In addition to the options available within the “WHEN” section of the Targeting tab, you can set a survey to fire based on the action was taken on site. One option is to Trigger a Nudge When an Element is Clicked. It is an excellent method that ensures your users are prompted for feedback at precisely the right moment.

Although exit-intent targeting isn’t available with mobile surveys, there are some alternatives you can review if you’re thinking proactively about bounce rate.

Be reserved

As a best practice, we recommend having only one Mobile Web survey available at a time during any one user journey. Having too many surveys live at once can create a negative experience, and each option above can help ensure you don’t over-survey your audience. 

Designing your Mobile Web Nudge 

Now that you’ve got a checklist for improving what to ask and customizing who to ask, we want to ensure we’re talking about the how. If your Nudge is an eye sore or doesn’t look cohesive with the rest of your website, visitors will be much less likely to engage with it. 

Match your brand colors

The Design tab of your survey will allow you to change the color attributes of your Nudge from the background color to the checkmark icon color at the end of the survey. We recommend selecting colors that are easy to read and match your website’s theme. You can even use the hex codes from your branding guide to ensure that the survey appears native and embedded.

Make the Nudge your own

If you are looking for more control over the look and feel of the Nudge and are on a Premium subscription or higher, you can leverage The Design API. The Design API will allow you to use Custom CSS to update the nudge colors, size, and more.

A common request is to reduce the amount of screen space the nudge covers. We have provided a code template in our help center for more info on how to do this!

Design for small screens and test on small screens

As we’ve stressed throughout this guide, mobile means less screen real estate, so you must make the most of your limited space. We encourage companies to replace Qualaroo branding with their logo. But for mobile, consider getting rid of any branding whatsoever. You want the survey to focus on your users and customers, not your company, but if you choose to keep it, make it small.

Finally, once you’ve done all that you can to optimize your mobile survey, please take a moment to test it live on a mobile environment. Although Qualaroo’s Design Tab will show you preview screens for every survey you take, you’ll want to ensure everything flows as intended on mobile devices.

Conclusion 

Mobile is an integral part of the overall user research strategy, but the way that you collect feedback on mobile sites needs to be intentional and specific for mobile phones.

To recap, remember your goals, what you need to ask to achieve those goals, who you want to ask questions to, and how you want to ask those questions. As you plan your mobile web nudge, ask yourself if survey composition, targeting, and design– the what, who, and how of feedback– align with your end goals.

Combining the strategies discussed above with Qualaroo's mobile surveys, seamlessly integrated into the user experience, can help you achieve a response rate of 10-30%.