Surveys are one of the easiest research tools to use, but also potentially the most misleading. So, proceed with caution!

The conversation here is one-sided. You don't have an ongoing dialogue with your users--instead, you're sending out a set of pre-written questions and hoping they respond in the right way. It's also much harder to gauge tone and sentiment and read into their way of thinking.

Unlike the other techniques we've mentioned in this chapter, surveys are a more quantitative tool. They're focused more on the quantity of responses rather than the quality of user thinking. This means they're a great tool to validate the size of the market (as we'll see later) but can easily lead you astray at this early stage of the process!

If you're at the very beginning of your product validation journey, we would strongly recommend that you avoid validating the problem using surveys alone. As intimidating as it might sound, you'll need to get up close and personal with real users at some point in the process.

There are many tools that you can use to create surveys but one of the easiest and cheapest (free!) is Google Forms . You can very quickly put together a few questions and generate a link that you can send out to your audience.

If you have an audience already (perhaps a newsletter list for your existing business), that's a great start. But if you don't, you'll just need to get creative. You could share your form with friends and family or you could seek out the type of users you're looking for. For example, if your product is a new tool to help teachers, try searching online for teaching communities, forums, Facebook groups or events.

Another interesting paid tool is Google Consumer Surveys. This allows you to set up and distribute surveys using Google's audience and charges you for responses (about 10¢ to $3.50 per completion). This is an interesting tool, but again, if you're at the early stage of your product journey you'd be well advised to get a little more hands-on with your research.

Be careful if you do choose to run surveys. There's more information about them in our UX Playbook.