February 10, 2026 Smashing Newsletter: Issue #545
This newsletter issue was sent out to 178,532 subscribers on Tuesday, February 10, 2026.
Editorial
Many surveys are biased, misleading, and not particularly actionable. People often don’t give true answers, or can’t answer truthfully. And then, what people answer, think, and feel are often very different things.
Surveys aim to uncover what many people think or feel. But often it’s what many people think they think or feel. However, they do help learn where users struggle and what users’ expectations are. So how do we design surveys to be more useful? Well, that’s what this newsletter is all about!
Set up your alarm clock for SmashingConf Amsterdam 2026 🇳🇱 — a friendly conference for designers and UI engineers all around UX and front-end. With design systems, accessibility, Figma, CSS, and AI — while enjoying the best views, fun, and gezelligheid! Jump to the schedule.
We put our heart into crafting inclusive, valuable events (online and offline!) for all of us to learn and grow. We have scholarships, volunteering options, and discounts for large groups, schools, and students. Just email us and we’ll sort it out.
Today’s newsletter is kindly powered by our friends at SurveyJS, who build powerful open-source form libraries for secure form creation and data collection in JS applications. You can build a fully custom form and survey management for your app — with full control over form UI, logic, and your users’ data, no external data storage, and no SaaS limits.
Hats off to the SurveyJS team for their hard work and continued support of the web community! 🧡
— Vitaly
1. Measuring UX in B2B
“How likely would you be to recommend our product to friends, family, or colleagues?” Survey questions like this have quite some drawbacks when you want to analyze what customers think of your product. Instead of relying on a single question, Anna Debenham recommends a combination of feedback scoring and gap analysis to gather user feedback and gain deeper insights into how users perceive your product.
2. Survey Design Cheatsheet
We create surveys to understand how people experience a product or feature, but they often reveal only the narratives people construct about their experience, not what they truly think or feel. To help you get the most out of your surveys, Vitaly created a survey design cheatsheet with practical techniques to reduce bias, increase completion rates, and uncover reliable insights.
3. UX Research Without Access To Users
Whether it’s strict NDAs, privacy regulations, or the fact that your product is still in an early phase, there are plenty of situations where you don’t have access to users to conduct UX research. Vitaly looks into workarounds that help you better understand user pain points and issues and shares tips for making a strong case for UX research when stakeholders are reluctant.
4. Overcoming Survey Challenges
Response biases make it difficult to create surveys that deliver reliable data. Tanner Kohler examines ten common ways in which survey participants tend to misinterpret their true thoughts and feelings. As he points out, it’s impossible to fully mitigate the effects of these tendencies, but there are preventive measures you can take to at least lessen them.
5. Writing Better Survey Questions
Finding just the right balance when writing survey questions can be challenging. You don’t want them to be too specific to not influence your respondents’ answers, but not all closed either, to give people the possibility to answer truthfully. Nikki Anderson shares a framework for writing survey questions that find just the sweet spot to deliver the insights you need.
Another fantastic guide on the topic comes from Maddie Brown. In it, she explores the ten most common and dangerous errors that can be made when designing a survey and how to avoid them.
6. Survey Design Guide
The team at Maze published a comprehensive guide that helps you maximize the potential of your UX surveys. It takes you through the complete process, from outlining the scope of your survey and writing survey questions to analyzing the results. Tips for choosing the right tools for your user research and survey best practices from UX leaders are also included.
7. Survey Response Scales
For a successful UX survey, the survey scale matters just as much as the language you use and the order of your questions. So, how to choose the right default values and ranges for your questionnaire? Alex Birkett wrote a practical guide that covers all the fine little details of designing survey rating scales.
8. Upcoming Workshops and Conferences
That’s right! We run online workshops on frontend and design, be it accessibility, performance, or design patterns. In fact, we have a couple of workshops coming up soon, and we thought that, you know, you might want to join in as well.
As always, here’s a quick overview:
- Design Patterns For AI Interfaces (or video) UX
with Vitaly Friedman. Feb 16 – Mar 2 - Designing For Complex UI Masterclass Design
with Vitaly Friedman. Mar 3–17 - Building Interactive, Accessible Components with Modern CSS & JS Dev
with Stephanie Eckles. Mar 5–13 - Figma Workflow Masterclass UX
with Christine Vallaure. Mar 18–24 - Measure UX and Design Impact UX
with Vitaly Friedman. Video + Live UX Training - Smart Interface Design Patterns UX
with Vitaly Friedman. Video + Live UX Training - Jump to all workshops →
9. Accessible UX Research, eBook Now Available For Download 📚
We’ve got exciting news! eBook versions of Accessible UX Research, a new Smashing Book by Michele A. Williams, are now available for download, and shipping will start soon. Order the eBook for instant download now or reserve your print copy at the presale price.
Accessible UX Research is your practical guide to making UX research more inclusive of participants with different needs — from planning and recruiting to facilitation, asking better questions, avoiding bias, and building trust. Download a free sample (PDF, 2.3MB) or get the eBook right away.
That’s All, Folks!
Thank you so much for reading and for your support in helping us keep the web dev and design community strong with our newsletter. See you next time!
This newsletter issue was written and edited by Geoff Graham (gg), Cosima Mielke (cm), Vitaly Friedman (vf), and Iris Lješnjanin (il).
Smashing Newsletter
Front-end, design and UX. Sent out 1× a week.You can always unsubscribe with just one click.