Software for Mobile Survey

I've found myself pondering the effect of mobile technology on the future of research, and figured it warranted a blog post.  I've been involved with both handheld surveys and wireless technology for most of my career, and throughout that time I've been amazed at both how quickly and how slowly things change.

Mobile technology itself moves incredibly quickly, but adoption of technology can range from lightning fast to incredibly slow. Market research professionals are analytical and pragmatic by nature, so it is understandable that researchers have been slower to embrace new technology than many other industries. Ironically, market research is often a key driver for decisions which drive technological advances, yet it can take years for those advances to be reflected back into the research process itself.  

Methodology is central to any decision relating to survey research methods.  When new techniques are introduced to "improve" tried-and-true processes, it is important for researchers to understand all of the implications of the potential change before implementing it en masse.  So research about research, or more specifically about new techniques for conducting research, is very important. But this is easier said than done, as most researchers are so busy generating revenue through existing methods that they lack time to explore new ones.  The academic community breaks a lot of ground in this regard, but it takes time for academic research to reach--and to be embraced by--the commercial market research sector.

Recently I have seen mobile research being embraced as a reasonably mainstream approach for survey data collection.  It is still "leading edge", but it is no longer "bleeding edge" -- at least for face-to-face interviews and diary studies.  While the application of mobile survey software is still a niche play today, we are about to see it extend beyond its traditional application to touch every other aspect of survey research -- including web surveys, phone surveys, mystery shopping and other methods.

What intrigues me more than anything is where this bottom-up thinking will really lead the research industry. While we are busy planning for the evolution of survey research to involve mobile technology, I believe it is equally important to see things from the top-down: i.e. to realize that researchers are losing control of people's attention, and consumers are increasingly recognizing the value of their opinions.  Will the methodologies of today be effective in the future, or do we need to reshape our thinking to embrace emerging realities?

I believe the future of mobile survey research looks a lot different than the past.  We will not simply see old methods enhanced by new technology; entirely new methods will emerge around the cultural phenomena that shape our societies around the globe. There is no limit to the opportunities that will be enabled by social networking and location-aware technology, which will be bundled into mobile technology that will make today's most impressive devices seem as archaic as early PCs appear today.

Those of us who wrap our arms around the cultural changes that emerge as a result of new technology, rather than just trying to shape new technology to meet old and tired methods, will realize amazing new opportunities for mining insight from consumer opinions. There will be many false starts and a lot of experimentation, but in a few years we will look back at the way we did things in 2009 and be amazed by how dramatically human communication -- and in turn market research -- have changed within a very short time.

I'll share some of my predictions on this blog over the coming months. Today I just wanted to get the thread started with some background thoughts...