Survey Questionnaires

Guess what are the three things people take when they leave home? - Wallet, keys and yes, mobile phones! Imagine browsing your Facebook account and accessing the news while on a bus on your way to work, or passing time playing games on your Ipad and checking the latest stock trends while waiting on an airport for a business trip? Sound all too familiar?

Gone are the days of paper surveys or email questionnaires where you often get poor response rates. With the advancement of mobile technology, market research surveys can be seamlessly integrated into mobile apps, making it more fun for consumers to respond than traditional methods. Mobile platforms such as Revelation Mobile, FocusForums’ Iphone App and Techneos’ Soda are just some of the mobile survey platforms available in the market.

According to Frank-Thomas Naether, the Managing Director of NMRC, “Mobile research is about ‘capturing the moment’. This is highly relevant when it comes to gaining insights into the decision making process of participants. There are many tools and methodologies available in the market, some of them are really interesting and fascinating, and offers many possibilities to researchers”, said Naether. 

He added, “Mobile Internet devices will become more and more central in everyone's life. Everybody is online and communication is possible in both directions. Online tracking studies are an interesting possibility and GPS technology will offer additional valuable information on how, when and where people do what. Mobile Research is still in its infancy and the possibilities are endless”.

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What's next for mobile market research?

If you haven’t heard yet, AT&T is dropping unlimited data! By the time I post this, it probably will be unavailable altogether. I'm sure it had nothing whatsoever to do with the timing of the Apple WWDC development conference where the new iPhone is expected to be announced - you know, the one that will probably make it even easier to consume hoards of wireless data. AT&T is letting existing customers keep their plans, but isn’t signing up new customers.

Now there will be two basic plans, one for ‘regular’ users and one for heavy users. If you believe AT&T, then this move will actually save most consumers money. But the problem is that people have no idea how much data they are using. Sure you can get apps to monitor your data use, and in reality, it’s only heavy video conference and mobile TV users who will surpass the new limits and who are causing problems, but it’s an easy decision for them – it ‘s the rest of us I worry about.

Is this a sign of things to come? Sprint still offers unlimited data, as I’m sure do many others. As the iPhone is released on more networks (if those rumours come true), then we will likely see the other carriers experience the same bandwidth problems that AT&T is experiencing.

p.s. for a good read, check out the previous post on this blog post “Are we in for a wireless traffic jam?”.

Furthermore, there’s some talk that 4G will deliver the ability for metered billing.

So what does this mean for research? Well, in one sense it bodes well for the use of Apps over the Mobile Web because Apps can be so much more efficient than the web. Furthermore, survey data is measured in kilobytes, let alone megabytes (until you start incorporating heavy multimedia transfer for display or capture). These plans allow for gigabytes – so we’re probably safe on that front… Apps also don't suffer from Latency like mobile websites do, so the experience is better (a little more on that here).

So will it truly matter to research? Users could become more hesitant to use their precious data allotment on surveys, no matter how compact our data is. Our primary challenge could become one of education in our screening and recruitment activities when we go to launch a customer satisfaction questionnaire, or any other mobile research program. Of course, we must also incent adequately to cover those costs AND the respondent's time.

Personally, I think the mobile Internet will eventually reach the state of the “regular” Internet, where most broadband companies stratify their offerings based on bandwidth (How fast can I get what I’m downloading), not total use (How much will it cost me if I download this)?

We have had good success getting people who are on a wide variety of networks to participate in a cellular survey, so frankly I’m not that worried. But, we continue to keep an eye on the evolution of the wireless marketplace, optimize our products, and work with our partners and clients to educate participants.

Meanwhile, the rest of the mobile world continues to trudge along the App path – Google now includes Apps in search results.

It’s all part of the fascinating evolution of mobility and research!

1. Augment traditional survey questionnaires with photos and locations to enrich data and drive new insights
2. Greater mobility means a higher likelihood that respondents will have the ability to take a survey anytime, anywhere
3. Time & location stamps give higher confidence that data was entered where and when it was supposed to/reported to be
4. Real-time data allows for compliance monitoring
5. Eliminate the problem of recall

Scenarios which can benefit significantly from a mobile survey system include:

·         Detailed Category Interaction (diary studies)– EG. Snacking/Eating:

o   Where and when did you eat? Why did you choose what you did? What options were available? How did you feel? Show us what you bought/made?

·         Consumption/Usage that happens anywhere, or where location affects choice:

o   FMCG, or disposable consumer goods

o   Tobacco & Alcohol (typically done in academic or social research settings)

o   Diapers

·         Understanding a day/week/month in the life of a respondent segment:

o   GPS capture for significant insight in to patterns

·         Shopping/Retail:

o   Exercises to create outfits, or understand how segments choose where to buy different articles of clothes

o   Pseudo-mystery shopping (audit retail vendor knowledge or Sales Rep attention to customer)

·         Medical:

o   Physician Drug rep encounters

o   Prescription/consumption and results of regulated products

·         Exploratory & Innovation. Perhaps most valuable for dynamic, important or changing segments:

o   New parents, Brand Mavens, Primary Grocery Shoppers, Baby Boomers

·         Advertising and Media Exposure:

o   Where & when did you see advertising? Show us the ad. How did it affect you?

·         Mobile populations, or users of a product or service that by definition is mobile:

o   Frequent fliers / Airline V.I.P.’s

o   Commuters /Heavy Transit Users

o   Sales/Service Reps

Here are the last two tips for this series to help you build quick and clean survey questionnaires in mobile survey software.

Include few or no hard coded strings in scripting

In general, scripting should be as compact and clean as possible, and you should avoid putting literal strings in the script.  This is for two reasons:

Literal strings make it extremely cumbersome to run a multilingual survey questionnaires as translations need to be hard-coded as well. Note that scripting is never included in translation files, so any survey translations sent to translators from Entryware will not include these strings

Scripts need to be parsed on each client every time they are run. That means if you include an especially long string in your scripting, the mobile devices will need to parse over it character-by-character. With sufficient strings in scripting, this can result in a noticeable slowdown in performance.

It is often safer and more elegant to use dummy categorical type of questions for these literal strings and text piping to accommodate scripted strings.

Simplify conditions used in multiple questions by using flag variables

Sometimes you have a few “classes” of respondent which are asked very specific questions.  Rather than create multiple copies of projects or questions, common sense tells you to use scripting in the prequestion of relevant questions to skip past if the respondent doesn’t need to answer the question. This is exactly the correct way to program the survey, but there are shortcuts you can use to reduce large numbers of conditional statements in multiple questions by using flag variables to simplify conditions.

A flag variable, in its simplest form, is a variable you define to have one value until some condition is true, in which case you change the variable's value.  It is a variable you can use to control the flow of a function or statement, allowing you to check for certain conditions while your function progresses. The idea is to use the flag variable mainly as a memory of other conditions which the function checks earlier in its execution.

It is easy to see how the amount of scripted logic can snowball when you have multiple preconditions or you need to combine the original logic with additional constraints. By creating a temporary “flag” variable, small bits of logic can be stored and frequently reused.  The best place for this is in the postquestion of the last question that affects the logic. The scripting for each of the relevant questions is, obviously, much simpler.

Take care in using flag variables. They can quickly become overly complex if you create too many or don’t use clear names.  
 
 

Here are two more tips to help you build quick and clean survey questionnaires in mobile survey software.

Use sections to group related questions

Sections are most commonly used to start and end question groups where you want to use rostering or looping, randomization, or rotation (Enterprise-only).  Since sections are never displayed to the user, you can use them sparingly to help you organize groups of questions in your project. 

Avoid using “goto this” on prequestion

The command “goto this” is used to reference the current question.  Using “goto this” is easier and more reusable than referring to an explicit question name. It forces the current question to be reloaded.  This is useful when you are doing additional validation in postquestion scripting. 

You can also use this command in a prequestion script, BUT you must be extremely careful!  If you allow for a scenario where the prequestion goto this always fires, you will send Entryware Mobile into an infinite loop and lock up the device! 
 
More tips next time!

Creating a survey questionnaire in Entryware is easy.  However, it can be incredibly frustrating.  The difference is in how you design your survey questionnaire.  Here are two tips to help you build quick and clean survey questionnaires in mobile survey software.  This will give Entryware programmers a feel of how to use Entryware to quickly build clean survey questionnaires.


Use meaningful, unambiguous question and response names and aliases

If you are working off a prepared script (for example, a provided Word document), it only makes sense to use the same question names as the source document. This aids in communicating changes or problem areas in the survey (be it in the source document or the Entryware project). 

Avoid using especially long or unhelpful question and alias names. Q1, Q2, Q3 are short and to the point, but if you arbitrarily chose these names you will have trouble finding your gender question if you forgot it was called Q94. Likewise, overly wordy names are problematic because they take up a great deal of screen space in both the question list and the script editor.

if  ((Q51_Age.Person1 < 21 ) | ( Q51_Age.Person1 > 40 ) ) & ( Q50_Gender = Male ) )

message “The first person cannot be a male between the ages of 21 and 40”

endif

This example provides a blend of readability and conciseness. The scripting can be read and understood by any reader even if the reader didn’t write the script to begin with. It isn’t so wordy that it scrolls far off the screen.

Use project-level question properties when appropriate

There are many question properties that you want to set for the entire survey questionnaire (e.g. auto advance, minimum responses, turning on or off the tool bar). It is possible to select all of the questions in the survey questionnaire and set them using the Question Properties frame, however this becomes clumsy to set (and change) in very large surveys and opens the very real risk that questions added at the last minute will not have the properties the rest of the survey questionnaire does. 

Project level settings can be done in OnStart or on the prequestion of first the question. Always remember, project level settings override the question properties widow and question level settings script override project level settings.

More tips next time!

• Sliding scale questions
• Photo capture on Palm OS, Windows and Windows Mobile
• Encrypted and compressed data transfer
• SPSS v13+ export
• Improved user-selectable missing
• Ability to launch external Windows Mobile applications
• Improved CSS formatting on Entryware Mobile for Windows
• Improved string handling in scripting
• Additional African language support
• Support for Palm Pre devices
• 5-way navigation
• Improved searching capabilities in Data View Report
• Project automation to auto-start questionnaires
• Improved graphics quality including hi-res Windows Mobile screens
• Diary survey engine for Windows Mobile
• Printing capability for Bluetooth printers
• Ability to convert Multiple Response questions to a series of Single Response questions
• Various other small enhancements

• Palm OS / Garnet OS
• Windows Mobile
• webOS (Palm Pre)

• Windows 98/XP/Vista

A customer recently called me and said "we have a big MCAPI project starting this summer. We've used Palms in the past with your PDA survey software for customer satisfaction questionnaires, but Palm is losing market share. What device should we use for our mobile data collection?"

I argued that market share in the consumer world is irrelevant to what gets the job done best for intercept research.

Some people think Palm is all but dead, but that's far from the truth. Did you know that Bono (yes THE Bono) just put hundreds of millions of dollars in to Palm?

And did you know that Windows Mobile is losing market share?



And no, it wasn't displaced by iPhone, but by RIM.


Yes, I realize that Palm is the smallest slice in this pie, but you don't even see Android on here (yet). Also, the Palm Centro was one of the best selling devices of 2008, with sales surpassing 2 million units in July of 2008.
The point is that you want to run your survey software on a device that is reliable and easy to use. It probably should have a touch screen and a keyboard, and offer good battery life. Palm and Windows Mobile both offer great devices in this regard.

I'll admit that Palm's story isn't all rosy, but they have a strong chance at re-winning some of that market share. ..and if you still don't believe me, check out this segment from Late Night with Jimmy Fallon.


 

Survey research abuse has been going on for a while. The MRA even offers definitions for SUGGING & FRUGGING (selling or fundraising under the guide of research). I've heard MUGGING for Marketing posing as survey questionnaires.

As we start thinking more about mobile market research, are we going to have to coin TUGGING for shady text messages? I couldn’t possibly keep a straight face.

Whatever it's called, every time the brightest minds in survey research find a new way to conduct timely market feedback (and yes, in this case I mean mobile phone surveys), mass marketers seem to find a way to blur the lines in the consumer’s mind between marketing and legitimate survey research.

As if researchers didn’t have enough to worry about with the number of cell-only households skyrocketing.

Consumer groups are already reacting to so-called “premium” text messages. Why the outrage? To borrow a paragraph directly from this news article:

Customers complained that they were charged $16 to $35 a month — up to $200 to $300 in total — for premium text messages even though they:
• Don't remember signing up for them or
• Weren't clearly told they would cost them a certain amount per message — typically $2, but ranging from 50 cents to $5 or
• Were unable to stop the messages from being sent to them.

I’d be mad, too. But perhaps the worst part is how research once again is getting lumped in with other marketing - “Such messages usually include quizzes, surveys, contests, jokes, horoscopes, sports scores and other content…”

Does it bother anyone else that we’re being lumped in with jokes and horoscopes?

On the flip side of the consumer abuse story, the Canadian National Do Not Call list (which excludes marketing research among some other organizations), seems to be working.

Clearly, the implication for researchers is to continue holding ourselves to the highest standards when we conduct survey research, especially as we move in to using more mobile survey software. For now that probably means only contacting people who have opted-in, and even more importantly, making it easy for them to opt out.