XM Essentials 1: Don’t Confuse the Kids

Previewing the Qualtrics XM Platform

In this course you’ll click through a series of five tabs to create, distribute, and analyze your survey:

1. Projects: Create and organize your survey projects.
2. Survey: Write, format, and edit your survey.
3. Distributions: Distribute the survey to collect your data.
4. Data & Analysis: Organize, sort, filter, and analyze your data.
5. Reports: Prepare, style, and report your survey’s results.

Project Dogfood

Product research can be tricky for anyone. So as we were thinking of ways to help our seven and nine-year-olds with their summertime lemonade stand, my wife Madhavi made a simple request: “Don’t confuse the kids!”

As product researchers, we can be guilty of complicating things. So, I asked my sons, Moksh and Naman, to grab the controls and help me start Project Dogfood*.

“Eating your own dogfood” implies researching, testing, and (in the case of running your own lemonade stand) tasting your products before you unleash them onto your unsuspecting customers. Previewing a survey before it goes out is another example of dogfooding. You want to catch your mistakes before customers do.

Plus, the boys thought the name was funny, so we went with it.

We logged in to the Qualtrics XM Platform™ and I talked them through the research tools I work with every day. “We’ll start where all Qualtrics surveys start: on the Projects page. It’s here that we’ll create our survey.”

*For more about “eating your own dogfood” and other principles of Product Experience (PX) research, visit the free online text, Product Experience Research — Moksh & Naman’s Lemonade Stand.

Try It!

Exercise A: Creating a Project

1. When you log into Qualtrics, it opens automatically to the Projects page.  Here you can:
   • Sort, search, copy, delete, and share multiple
   • View a project’s performance metrics throughout its life cycle. For example, you can see how many responses you’ve collected, 12 day activity trends, and the length of your survey.
2. Click Create new project to begin a new survey.
   
3. Click the CoreXM tab and choose Survey.
   
4. Give the survey a name.
   
5. Click Get Started to move on to the Survey tab, the center of survey editing in Qualtrics.
6. When the Survey tab opens, you can enter your first question. We rewrote ours to say: How much do you like lemonade?
   
   Qtip: A Multiple Choice question will appear by default. You’ll learn to alter question types in XM Essentials 2 and XM Essentials 3.
7. Click outside the text editing box to save the question text.
8. Qualtrics will populate possible answer choices based on the word “like”.
   

What’s Next?

1. Learn about Product Experience Management by reading about Moksh & Naman’s Lemonade Stand.
2. Continue to XM Essentials 2: Adding New Ingredients.