This is the first of six design best practices.
Setting concrete project objectives is often one of the hardest steps in a project. This involves creating a problem statement to guide your survey project and also provides a reference tool to help you prioritize the questions to ask in your survey.
Using objectives as a reference tool will reduce the temptation to add questions that do not tie directly to your business problem statement and create an unnecessarily long survey.
The statement should be specific to an identified business problem you want to solve.
What do you want to know?
Which specific outcomes do you need?
Which problems do you need to solve to move your business forward?
Brainstorm the business problem in a group to arrive at a simple statement.
It is good practice to discuss this in detail in a team to include different perspectives and ensure that your stakeholders' objectives are well understood before any questions are designed. These are usually influenced by anecdotal observations or high-level exploration of Operational Data.
Questions to ask in this group:
Who? Who are the people with the problem? Are they end-users, stakeholders, teams within your business? Have you validated the information to see what the scale of the problem is?
What? What is its nature and what is the supporting evidence?
Why? What is the business case for solving the problem? How will it help?
Where? How does the problem manifest and where is it observed?
Examples of well-written statements include:
“Why do sales peak at certain times of the day?”
“Why are customers abandoning their online shopping carts at the point of sale?”
"Why do employees with 3+ years tenure have lower productivity than those of lower tenure?"
"What is the relationship between marketing spend and trail shoe product sales over the last 12 months?"
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Optional additional learning: You can learn more about writing research objectives here. |