Started in 2006, The HaTS questionnaire was created by Hendrik Muller and Aaron Sedley from Google to assess all their products by tracking user attitudes and experiences from real-world products used at a large scale. After many iterations, the survey has been a success and is now used as a standard across the company.
Designed to track happiness as a set of metrics such as…
- Overall satisfaction
- Likelihood to recommend
- Perceived frustrations, and
- Attitudes towards common product attribute, among others.
With the goal to optimize validity, reliability, and sensitivity…
- Track changes in users attitudes and perceptions over time
- To collect open-ended feedback (both frustrations and appreciation). This can then generate prioritised lists of frustrations and appreciation which can inform product strategy.
- Characterise the products user base as well as to identify how users with different characteristics compare on those metrics tracked for the above goals
- To enable additional survey research with a representative sample of the entire user base in an extremely fast manner.
How is this achieved?
It is best used when you are able to review 400-1000 responses. To reduce effects of survey fatigue and frustration the same user should NOT be invited to partake in HaTS again for another 12weeks. The UI of the survey is also important. The design of the survey should not be a pop-up, as this can distract a user’s workflow and upset them.
To avoid question order bias, the questions were designed to have a funnel approach – meaning questions don’t influence questions later in the survey. This is achieved by breaking the survey into three distinct parts: (1) starts off broad and high-level with a more specific and personal question/s. Asking about the product as a whole which helps build rapport with the user. (2) After the high-level attributes have been assessed the more common product attributes/features can be assessed. (3) Ask questions about the respondent’s characteristics which may be more sensitive.
To create a more natural mapping and to encourage respondents to spend more time on the frustrations, is to add these questions before the areas/questions of appreciation. Another technique is to increase the size of the text box. The size of the text box can sneakily suggest the appropriate amount of text needed.
One key takeaway by Google…
By asking users about their ‘experienced frustrations’ and ‘needed new capabilities’ in the same question, responses doubled and responses were more thoughtful in their description.
Anna Edwards 