Running a user experience survey on your website helps you understand what's working and what's frustrating your visitors.
Great questions for website UX go beyond basic satisfaction ratings—they uncover specific pain points in navigation, content understanding, and conversion blockers.
We'll explore proven question examples and show how to deploy them most effectively with conversational AI surveys, so you always get meaningful insights (not just numbers).
Questions that reveal navigation problems
Navigation friction often goes unnoticed until you ask the right questions. Even the sleekest design can leave users puzzled at key moments, making them abandon ship without ever telling you why. To get to the bottom of navigation issues, I use pointed questions—plus AI-driven follow-ups to pull out richer detail:
"What were you trying to find on our website today?"
This reveals the gap between a visitor’s intent and what your actual navigation delivers. If users regularly struggle to reach their goal, your IA needs work."Did you find what you were looking for?"
This binary prompt helps measure direct success, but a simple yes or no only scratches the surface. If someone says "no," a smart survey will dig further."Which part of our website was most confusing?"
This pinpoints specific problem areas—menus, filters, weird page titles—that are leading to lost business.
What I love about automatic AI-powered follow-up questions is that they jump in naturally when someone mentions a struggle. For example, if a visitor says they were confused, the survey might respond with,
Can you describe what made that section confusing?
This kind of prompt reveals not just where users got stuck, but why.
If you're curious about real-world performance, studies show that 88% of online consumers are less likely to return to a site after a bad experience with navigation or content[1]. That’s too big to ignore.
Testing if your content actually makes sense
Let’s face it: content clarity makes or breaks conversions. If visitors don’t “get” what you do within seconds, they bounce. I focus on questions that check both understanding and completeness:
"After reading our homepage, what do you think we do?"
This one gets right to the heart of messaging effectiveness. Does your homepage say what you think it does?"What information is missing that would help you make a decision?"
This uncovers holes in your content—pricing, guarantees, social proof, etc.—that prospects expect before moving forward.
Vague Question | Specific Question |
|---|---|
Is our content helpful? | What specific information would make our content more helpful to you? |
See the difference? The more precise your question, the more actionable your answer.
With conversational surveys, you can adapt questions based on which pages users actually visit. Someone reading the pricing page might get something like:
Did our pricing page make everything clear, or did you wish for more detail?
This kind of adaptive questioning makes every response more contextual and useful.
According to Nielsen Norman Group, 57% of users leave a page if they can’t figure out right away what a site offers[2]. That’s a huge chunk of lost opportunity—make sure you know what’s missing from your content.
Finding what stops people from converting
Checkout blockers aren’t always obvious. Sometimes it’s broken buttons or missing info; other times, it’s a feeling—like not trusting your site enough to pull the trigger. I rely on questions that dig into every phase of the conversion process:
"What almost stopped you from completing your purchase?"
Timing is everything. If you ask this right after a conversion, the pain points are fresh in your customer’s mind—so you get honest, actionable feedback."What would make you more confident about buying from us?"
This opens up space for users to talk about trust issues: skepticism, unclear return policies, lack of reviews, etc."At what point did you consider leaving our site?"
By identifying where users almost bailed, you highlight bottlenecks and leaks in your funnel.
With Specific’s in-product survey widget, you can trigger these questions at just the right moment—for example, after someone starts but doesn’t finish checkout, or right after purchase. These event triggers help you catch feedback at the decision points where it truly matters, not hours later when it’s lost in the fog.
According to the Baymard Institute, almost 70% of shopping carts are abandoned, but most of the barriers can be fixed if you know exactly what’s holding your users back[3]. Stop guessing; go find out directly from your customers.
Smart deployment: timing and targeting your UX survey
Survey timing can make or break response quality—ask too early and users lack context, too late and they’ve already forgotten key moments.
Use event-based triggers: Launch surveys right after checkout, after a key feature is used, or after a customer support chat. Context is everything when you want authentic, relevant responses.
Here’s a practical tip: don’t pop up a survey before users have even explored your site, and don’t keep pestering the same people every visit. Frequency controls are essential to prevent survey fatigue. With Specific's widget, you can limit how often someone sees a survey (like once a month or only after they do something new).
Play with placement options: A bottom-right widget feels conversational and non-intrusive (great for ongoing feedback), while a center overlay is more direct but can disrupt the experience. I usually mix and match placement based on the type of insight I need.
Lean into behavioral targeting: Ask the right questions, at the right time, to the right people. For example, ask first-time buyers about onboarding, but prompt long-term customers about retention.
All these flexible options are built into Specific’s widget—no code changes required, which makes A/B testing survey tactics surprisingly easy.
Turning user feedback into UX improvements
Collecting responses is only half the story—analyzing user feedback effectively determines whether you actually make improvements or just fill a spreadsheet.
AI-powered analysis goes a long way here. With Specific’s survey response analysis tools, you can instantly spot patterns, cluster similar feedback, and surface the core issues buried in qualitative comments.
Here are example prompts I rely on for getting actionable insights from survey data:
Show me all responses where users mentioned difficulty finding specific features or pages
What information are users consistently saying is missing from our product pages?
Based on user feedback, what are the top 3 UX improvements we should prioritize?
You get answers in seconds, not days—no manual sorting required. High-impact analysis like this lets product teams spend more time fixing real problems, rather than just collecting data. If you want to collaborate on survey design or edit questions for better targeting, there's also a handy AI survey editor for rapid iteration.
Remember, your best ideas rarely come from guessing—they come from listening deeply, then acting fast.
Start improving your website UX today
Conversational AI surveys capture far deeper insights than old-school forms and are quick to set up. Create targeted UX surveys using AI in minutes with Specific's AI survey generator. Ready to uncover what's really happening on your website? Create your own survey and start collecting actionable UX insights.