How Often to Question?

Best practices for balancing getting insights with a good user experience

Sprig has 2 different ways of controlling how often the same users can be resurveyed or recontacted with the same questions.

First, by default, the same user will never see the same study twice. This is to ensure data quality for your studies in addition to preventing users from being overwhelmed multiple times with the same question when they have already decided they did not want to participate. It is possible, however, to override this behavior on a per-study basis.

Second, Sprig leaves it up to each account owner to determine how often the same user may see different studies. This value is controlled by the recontact waiting period, which can be chosen on the settings page. Choosing a recontact waiting period of 7 days, for example, means that users will not see any new studies for at least 7 days from the last time they were shown a study. One exception to this is link studies, as these studies are anonymous and delivery to users is not managed by Sprig.

How to choose your recontact waiting period

In general, when it comes to in-product studies, there are 2 competing goals:

  • Extract valuable insights from users to inform product and business decisions.
  • Minimize disruption to users' activities in your product.

Therefore, when choosing your recontact waiting period, we encourage companies to set the window as long as they can without minimizing their ability to achieve the first goal of extracting critical insights. The factors to consider here are:

  • How many visitors do you have per month?
  • How many studies do you intend to run per month?
  • How often might your users reasonably expect to be questioned?

All other things being equal, 30 days is a good starting point for your recontact waiting period. This will ensure you are not over-questioning your users and for many companies, will be short enough to achieve the necessary level of response even when running multiple studies simultaneously. However, companies with larger monthly visitor counts may want to extend the period even more, to as many as 90 days between studies.

Companies with smaller user bases will likely need to set a shorter recontact window. If you find you are not getting the level of response you need from your studies, consider lowering your window to 14 days, then to 7 days if an additional change is needed. The shortest recommended window is 7 days.

One exception to this recommendation is products in beta, or very early-stage startups, in which companies not only have small user bases, but users may reasonably expect to be contacted for feedback frequently. In this case, all bets are off, and you may set your recontact window to 3, 1, or even 0.