Picture this. You open an app for the first time, excited to explore. Then BAM! You're hit with a full-screen survey. 

"How satisfied are you with our new features?" 

New features? You haven't even seen the old features yet. You're already frustrated and annoyed. 

That's why context is important. It's how most surveys go ignored. Instead, you need to pop the right question at the perfect moment. You need to offer a contextual survey. 

Unlike traditional surveys, contextual surveys appear when and where they matter most, making feedback effortless for users and incredibly useful for product teams. So if you're serious about improving UX, feature adoption, and retention, making a contextual inquiry needs to be your most prized research method. 

So let's dive into everything about keeping context front and center for every UX survey. 

What Is a Contextual Survey?

A contextual survey is often a short, targeted survey triggered by specific user interactions. Instead of the usual shotgun approach of appearing at the same time for all users, they appear when the user is actively engaging with a feature, completing an action, or showing signs of frustration. The goal? To capture feedback in context when it’s fresh and relevant. These surveys are a key part of qualitative research methods, helping UX researchers observe pain points, conduct user interviews, and generate actionable insights. 

Here are some core qualities that set contextual surveys apart:

• Timing: these surveys pop up in the right context, not days later in an email.
  
  
• Relevance: questions are directly related to what the user is doing at that moment.
  
  
• Minimal effort: users don’t feel like they’re filling out another long, tedious form. A contextual inquiry will make it easier for users to respond.
  
  

Why Contextual Surveys Work Better

Your run-of-the-mill traditional user research methods often get ignored because they're delivered at the wrong time, to the wrong people, in the wrong situation. Compared to that, contextual inquiries deliver much better results. Here's a summary of why keeping it in context is better. 

1. Have Higher Response Rates

Since they appear in the moment, users are more likely to respond than if they receive a survey days or weeks later. By embedding surveys naturally within user journeys, you can observe responses in real-time, providing valuable insights into usability testing and product interactions. Contextual inquiry helps you capture natural behaviors, take notes on interactions, and summarize their findings effectively.

2. Provide More Accurate Data

Asking users about an experience while they’re still engaged with it, is like observing wild animals in their natural environment instead of seeing them in the zoo, which is basically what an email survey sent a week after is. The responses are much more genuine and closer to their actual user experience, and it produces a much better insight, especially if you're trying to conduct causal research between a feature and the user experience. 

3. Feel Less Intrusive

Here's the thing about user behavior research. When you separate them from their natural environment (which is their experience in the product), their answers may change. Instead of interrupting a user's workflow, contextual surveys feel like a natural extension of the user experience. Direct observation plays a key role in making feedback collection seamless. The ability to watch user interactions in their natural environment ensures that research findings reflect genuine user behavior. By conducting interviews alongside contextual surveys, researchers can gather both qualitative and quantitative data.

Use Cases for Contextual Surveys

So what are some good use cases for this UX research method? Well frankly, many, and depending on how creative you can get, making a contextual inquiry toward your users can be done anywhere across your user journey. So we'll go over some of the main ones here. 

User Onboarding Feedback

Onboarding is a great way to bring new users on board, but it's not always perfect. Asking contextual surveys at specific points can validate certain onboarding issues so you can address it clearly. For example, if you make the observation that there is a drop off of user engagement in a particular step, then you can try asking whether there were any difficulties in the onboarding when the user is going through that exact step. 

Feature Adoption

You just launched a new feature. That's awesome, but do users like it? Are they struggling? This is where contextual surveys can help validate feature success. By triggering surveys when the user experiences the new feature, UX researchers can conduct usability testing, take notes on user interactions, and refine product design. In addition, conducting structured interviews can also provide deeper insights. 

Customer Satisfaction (CSAT & NPS)

Measuring Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Customer Satisfaction Score through contextual surveys ensures relevant, timely insights into how users feel about your product. Usually these are done in a way where you ask:

"How Satisfied are you with this experience" (1-5 scale) 

Other categories of customer satisfaction surveys include Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) and Customer Effort Score (CES). Researchers can also ask open-ended questions to gather deeper insights into user thought processes. 

Churn Prevention

When users show signs of leaving, asking why can help improve retention, or at least validate why they're leaving so you can address the issue. Contextual surveys allow you to conduct an impromptu snap interview with your users on why they're turning away. So whenever you observe that your users are leaving, try to re-capture your user's attention or at least get some insights by pushing a contextual inquiry. 

The Secret to High-Performing Contextual Surveys

Now that we've talked about why contextual surveys are great and for what you can use them for, let's get into how you should deploy contextual surveys. 

1. Keep It Short

One or two open-ended questions are all you need. Long surveys get abandoned. Researchers should focus on specific research objectives and qualitative research methods to maximize engagement. Asking questions that cut to the chase helps ensure responses are clear and actionable.

2. Trigger Surveys at the Right Time

We've established that context is important. Which means, you have to carefully think about how your survey questions will pop up. Even if you're trying to attempt causal research by aiming directly at the user action, you never interrupt users mid-task. Instead, ask after they complete an action or show hesitation (you can do this by seeing if users pause or meander).

3. Ask Actionable Questions

Just because you're getting them at the right time doesn't mean you can cheap out on your question's quality. Be direct, and be actionable. Skip vague questions like "Give us any feedback you have!" That creates hesitation, and the moment your user hesitates, it's over. Instead, use structured responses like multiple-choice or clearly worded open-ended questions to encourage useful insights that users can easily answer right away. 

4. Use Analytics to Turn Insights into Action

What’s the point of collecting user feedback if you don’t act on it? So make sure whatever you observe about your user experiences flow into your product strategy. Take notes on key observations, document user pain points, and iterate based on those insights.

Context is King 

By now you should that surveys should always ben contextual. Rather than spraying and praying with your ill-time user surveys and interviews, ask a question precisely into where it matters. That way, you get the highest quality data you can get about your users' experience in your product. 

Now, making contextual inquiry as your main research method is all good, but how do you go about actually creating such surveys? Well, that's where you have to find the right tool. 

For that, you should try Userflow. With everything you need to build and deploy contextual surveys quick and easy, you'll be collecting high quality UX feedback in no time. Try now for free!