Audio / Video Survey
Question
May 2026 - July 2026
01
🎯 My Role
As the solo Product Designer, I reworked the Audio/Video question type in our Survey Builder, taking it from a developer-built internal presentation to a user-facing feature. I worked closely with a Principal Designer, PM's, UXR, and the Dev team to effectively meet user needs while staying within feasibility.
• Evaluated and identified key friction points within the currently built feature
• Used competitor analysis and user insights to begin shaping a more refined product
• Designed key interactions to solve for Min. and max. recording, Audio only, Continue Recording, permissions,
and more.
• Reviewed with both Designs and Product teams and made adjustments accordingly
• Adjusted the design based on development scope and timeline. Shipping a simplified version for the first
release, with the fuller design planned as a follow-up.
02
The Challenge
A big part of designing for the Survey Builder is holding two workflows in mind at once: the survey creator's and the survey taker's. For this question type, the creator sets the minimum and maximum recording length, so the design has to communicate those limits clearly to the taker, while giving them guardrails to re-record or continue recording.
Additionally, I needed to take into account how other products handled similar features. Taking Jakob's Law into account, our feature should not create a learning curve for the user and should have a similar flow as other products.
03
Research and Discovery
Talking with UXR and the PMs, I learned that a recently acquired enterprise client had driven the need for an updated Audio / Video question type and that both the client and our competitive research pointed to demand for an audio-only version.
What Stakeholders are Saying
Direct Competitive Research
To understand how others were solving this, I reviewed two direct competitors. Qualtrics came first, their platform overlaps heavily with ours, so their patterns were the most transferable. Alchemer followed, as a point of contrast.
Adjacent Competitive Research
Since people are using products like Google Meet more than ours, its safe to assume they learn their recording behaviors from these type of products. I looked at how Meet asks for camera access and signals that it’s recording, since respondents are familiar with these actions.
04
Insights that Shaped Design
05
High Level Mapping of the Recording Process
The recording flow combines minimum and maximum durations with a Continue Recording option, which creates several paths to error and unclear outcomes. Helping users recognize, diagnose, and recover from those errors was crucial.
06
Design Outcomes
First Release
For the survey creator, I first wanted to update the old components to something cleaner, smaller, and easier to scan. Our Design System Manager had recently been updating our design system so after a few iterations, we landed on these cards. They also scale better when a photo is added to the question.
Simplified version of Audio Only and Audio / Video. No Continue Recording or animations
Second Release
07
Audio / Video Demo
08
Personal Reflection
My biggest takeaway was balancing the team’s timeline against users’ needs. We solved the largest use cases first so respondents got something that worked in the short term, while keeping the refinements that would make the tool feel complete on the roadmap. I’d have liked more room to explore additional features, such as video trimming, but nothing in the research suggested respondents wanted it in a survey context, and building on instinct alone wasn’t justifiable.
The research was the most interesting part of this project. Plenty of recording platforms get heavy use, but nearly all of them serve a different purpose than ours, and the products aimed at our exact use case felt underbuilt. I had to judge which conventions carried over from adjacent tools and which ones stopped making sense once someone was taking a survey.