Get tips and inspiration for your online + mobile qualitative research
Written by our own experts and other leading thinkers in the market research industry, we’ll help you get the most from the new techniques and tools on offer for richer, faster insight.
When moderating and analysing, sometimes you want quick access to all of the context you have on a participant. It’s one thing to know the segment they are in but it can be a whole lot more useful to know where they are from, what their income is, what their hobbies and interests are, and what you and your colleagues said about them.
Alternatively, sometimes, for instance in a longer term communities, you might want willing participants to share more about themselves with others, to help them get to know each other and inspire new and better conversations.
A real challenge this one, as Arabic works right to left and making your platform work perfectly in two opposite directions is not easy…however, we are now very happy to announce that we have now added Arabic to our long list of available languages and with it, another 425 million people you can talk to on Liveminds.
Recruitment for your online + mobile projects is even more important than it is for online projects. Whilst the mobile app itself is really easy to use, the reality is that there are:
This does increase the important of finding people with the right kit and the right know-how to respond using the app.
However, with Liveminds there is no need to ensure everyone has a smartphone to participate in an online + mobile project. This gives you the freedom to focus on recruiting exactly the sample you need, rather than worrying about people’s technical know-how.
If a potentially great participant doesn’t have smartphone, there’s no need to leave them out of your project, they can simply reply to those same activities on the website instead.
This means you get the best possible participants, able to express themselves in the way they feel most comfortable with. CC Image courtesy of DavidDennisPhotos.com
Adding participants to your project, is not the exactly the most rewarding part of your online qual project. Better then, that the whole thing be done as simply and quickly as possible.
To help with this, we have added a little button that speeds the process up for you. When you’ve entered a participant’s details, you can now click a ‘Create & Add Another button to instantly reload the page, so you can get straight onto the next one. The form remembers the key characteristics of the participant you’ve just entered, such as their group and their preferred language. We’ve also made some tweaks to the way this feature works for creating questions, to make entering your discussion guide faster too. If you’ve got a question about this or any other feature, get in touch.
One of the biggest battles in the world of research is being fought out between the ‘engagement’ and ‘science’ schools of thought. I believe that the best technology partners are the ones who can keep them both happy, by facilitating engaging experiences for participants and granting sufficient control to researchers.
The conflict raises questions about how scientific online qualitative researchers should be. For example, should they present stimulus in a controlled, private way? Or should they instead focus on getting more value out of participants by making the experience engaging, open and social?
In the scientific corner we have the traditionalists, dedicated to techniques that control the group effect. For example they might insist on getting private responses before exposing a piece of stimulus to the whole group. In general, they want online qualitative platforms that give them control and therefore produce higher levels of confidence in the results. That’s all well and good but it makes the experience less interesting for the participants (which in turn means they need to be paid more to take part).
Is your agency really ready to win business and deliver great results in 2013 with online + mobile qual?
Liveminds’ new Partner Program is a bespoke 6 month course of workshops, training, consultancy and creative support, to help you do lots more of that. We will fast track your agency’s online + mobile offering and ensure all your key people are ready for this new era in our industry.
Mobile qual is at the forefront of many researchers’ minds this year. It’s set to grow by as much as 253% this year, according to the latest GRIT report. The value of being able to get closer to consumers than ever before and capture thoughts and experiences ‘in the moment’ is clear – it’s more real and much more powerful.
Since Liveminds became the first online qual company in Europe to add mobile to its’ platform in February 2012, launching simultaneously on iPhone and Android, we have learnt a lot about how it works in practise too. Almost 60% of our projects now have mobile activities in them as well. We’ve fed all this learning back into evolving the platform to make the joined up online + mobile experience super smooth for participants and researchers. So now you’ve got the ability to effortlessly combine online + mobile in your research, the key thing is to design your project to get the most out of each channel. So below we’ve shared 8 key lessons we’ve learned over the last 12 months to help you with your next project.
Great online qual research is typically about engaging participants in good conversations and observing what they really do, as they live their lives. Sometimes though, you may want to go beyond that, with ‘quantitative’ questions or more creative visual exercises in your Liveminds project. Sometimes your clients may demand it of you.
Now you can easily do that with the launch of our ‘Custom Questions’ service. This gives you the option of choosing from more than 30 extra research questions types in your Liveminds project. These range from simple polls to tables, ranking exercises, image heat maps and card sorting exercises. It gives you a huge range of extra tools in your box, to get exactly the results you need.
Nothing is more dull than writing the same things twice. Copy and paste is a lifesaving tool but wouldn’t it be even better if you could just click a button and everything you’d just typed was instantly duplicated, straight away?
Well, the new feature we’ve added to Liveminds enables you to do just that. So, whether you are creating a diary study and wanting to ask the same questions each day of the week, or whether you want to set up another whole project for another market, with an identical discussion guide, now with one click it’s all done. You can even duplicate an individual question.
We think this new feature will save some of you a lot of time and make the set up of your Liveminds project even faster and easier than before. Yet, none of this will compromise the huge flexibility of the Liveminds platform to create your project in exactly the way that you want to.
If you’d like to see how this or any other Liveminds feature works, please do get in touch.
CC Image courtesy of Ethermoon on Flickr.
Ease of use and flexibility is at the heart of Liveminds online qual platform. Our goal is to make researcher’s work online as effortless as possible, so they can focus completely on finding great insights for their clients.
Of course, the platform is just one part of the project process. Things don’t always happen when we want them to. Recruiters send lists late, participants suddenly have other commitments and need to be replaced, clients make last minute adjustments to discussion guides.
So, we’ve released an update today which takes the pain of this away.
