Published April 27, 2021

What’s the Difference Between the Best and the Worst? MaxDiff, Of Course.

2 min read

The newest feature on Helio asks customer to make trade-offs

MaxDiff… sounds like a cute little robot.

In a lot of ways, it is a cute little robot of survey questions here in Helio. This question type lets you easily measure an audience’s preference — i.e. “best” to “worst” or “most” to “least”.

So let’s meet our little robotic… um question type… MaxDiff.

MaxDiff in action.

In programing this feature, we challenged our hunches by using our own audiences within Helio. Mainly design-decision makers and researchers.

A Dependable Question Type

The result is a dependable question type that takes the guesswork out of measuring preference or value.

  • Know what your audience prefers. In the simplest terms, MaxDiff questions measures a customers’ preference or importance of items on a list, usually indicating the “best/worst” or “most/least”. We learned over 80% of researchers do learn about customer preferences.
  • Save time and get succinct answers. Researchers lean towards one-on-one interactions when learning from customers, which is a time-consuming process. MaxDiff removes the need for multiple steps in the process of learning a customers’ preference for a product or feature. MaxDiff uses a single question to gauge preference across multiple areas at once.
  • Benefits many teams. MaxDiff is very versatile. Teams from design and development to marketing and sales can utilize this gem of a question type to learn from customers. The amazing thing is so many teams have access to researchers! Some highlights include prioritizing features or function, what marketing messaging resonates with a customer, and what a customer’s focus is when making the decision to purchase.

Knowing what’s most important and least important to customers helps companies know where to invest time, talent, and resources.

This becomes even more important while we’re all figuring out what’s next while we navigate our new reality.

We believe learning and growing from your customers is what’s going to make companies successful going forward.

Build something your users truly want