Surveys Feature - The Iron Armor Against Blogging Traps

Issue

Hello readers of 2coffee.dev, last week was another busy week for me as I just finished implementing the surveys feature for the blog.

Surveys? A place where lots of questions come up, taking up your time, or even causing annoyance and frustration. Honestly, I'm not someone who enjoys participating in surveys, but I'm quite actively clicking on short survey forms, like "Is this information useful to you?" or "Did you find a solution to the problem in this answer?". Because these questions are simple, it only takes a click to instantly convey my message to them. Every time I click, I hope my feedback is recorded and it can serve as a basis for them to optimize the experience for future users.

Ultimately, surveys are a way to help observers understand the hidden thoughts of users. Surveys are not bad, but making surveys reasonable and making everyone want to participate immediately is the difficult part.

Last week, I added a small survey at the bottom of the blog post, hoping it would get noticed. The questions are relatively brief and come with concise options, but they provide me with valuable information.

In the past, I often fell into the "feature trap" when starting something new. A product, like this blog, should integrate as many features as possible, what other websites have, mine should have more. Not to mention whether it's good or bad, but one thing is certain: I always have an endless list of features to do. But what is important is not knowing if anyone uses them, and even what truly brings value to users is often forgotten.

Surveys have been a planned feature for quite some time. At that time, I thought about how to design this feature, but due to various reasons and identifying some seemingly important tasks that need to be prioritized, it was put on hold. A month ago, Posthog - a tool used for user behavior research, added a new feature called Surveys. Oh! This is exactly what I needed, let's see how it works.

Perfect, everything met my needs. I immediately started working on the new feature, tested it, and it was ready to be put into production. But it was only this morning that I discovered the free account is limited to 250 responses per month for all survey questions, after which the starting price is $0.2 for a new response. Yes, you didn't mishear me, it costs $1 for every 5 responses!?. Hmm, it seems a bit little, but it's okay. Looking at past statistical data, 250 is still within an "acceptable" range. But if in the future, the readers enjoy surveys and the number of responses increases, I might have to come up with a new solution for myself because where am I going to get the money to pay them.

Surveys will appear randomly in each blog post, right below the article rating frame. If you have any emotions after reading an article, please click and let me know. Your thoughts are valuable for me to improve the quality of the articles. At the same time, the responses targeted at surveys will also be important data for further development in the future.

Plan

To be honest, there are many questions I want to ask the readers. But not all questions are easy to answer or can be answered concisely. Therefore, I need to systematize the question content as well as the answers to make them concise.

Usually, the surveys that I create focus on questions with choices, and readers just need to click, click, click... Questions that require users to enter their own answers often take more time and can be ineffective. Even I am the same, I only leave constructive feedback when I am truly interested and fond of the product. Instead of spending time thinking about words for no reason.

I will consider all the feedback from readers, from which I will make decisions on whether to implement new features or not. More than anyone else, I do not want to fall into the so-called "feature trap", and I also believe that readers themselves want to experience something new and useful. So, let's build a feedback culture together for everything to further develop!