Forget Mobile First --The Future of Research is Device Agnostic

The reality is researchers have struggled with adapting to mobile even though three in ten surveys are currently completed on a mobile device It requires people to alter the way they ask questions and change is difficult But this is not a new phenomenon things had to change when research moved from face to face to telephone and from telephone to online The pain of those changes has faded with time but old people like me remember themToday our reality is that planning for mobile first design is good for now but it is not the way of the future The future of research must be device agnostic because of the fragmentation and rapid changes in the way people communicateI email my fatherinlaw but text my children My kids snapchat with their friends Maybe I will ask Siri to find me some information Or maybe I will type my search People are now free to choose how they communicate and use multiple methods depending on where they are and who they are communicating with As researchers we have no choice but to adapt to these fragmenting and fluid modes of communication If we don39t adapt we will become irrelevant because our data will not be representativeA matter of life and deathA paper I recently saw presented atamp160ESOMAR39samp160Big Data conference underscored just how important it is to communicate with people using the methods they want In the case of this study having the best data available was literally a matter of life and deathThe presentation was about a public health study that gathered data that was used to combat the Zika virus It involved collecting answers to questions as well as geolocation data and photographs A very large sample was needed because the data was being used to map areas where there were breeding grounds for mosquitoes The more data they could get and the more representative the data was the better they could direct public health resources This was a highstakes study where getting good representative data was not an academic exercise It was the difference between eradicating Zika or allowing it to ravage the populationThat39s why when they went to collect the data they connected with people using multiple methods They surveyed 300000 people through email They also connected with 400000 through text invites But those numbers were dwarfed by the 750000 people they contacted through WhatsApp an app popular in BrazilThe research identified areas where there was standing water near where people lived By surveying over a million people they generated maps that guided the health department in eradicating breeding grounds for mosquitos As a result they largely eliminated the spread of Zika But imagine if they only used email to survey people How well would that have worked How many more people would have contracted the virusThe future is comingfastWe have been keeping our eye on the horizon looking for changes in how people communicate and in how they might want to do surveys We have been running a series of studies in United States and Canada on alternative methods of recruitment and survey takingamp8212including text apps voice to text passive measurement video openends voice assistants and AIdriven qualitative interviewingWe39ve found that for many of these approaches there is a considerable interestamp8212particularly amongst millennials and younger These findings are detailed in our whitepaperamp160The Future of Feedback Consumer Interest in New Ways of Doing ResearchThe overarching finding of these investigations is that the future of feedback will continue to fragment and morph over time That means we must design our research to use approaches that will work equally well when asked by Siri as when answered on a desktop We have to be prepared to use designs and technology that can accept inputs from any source This will have many implications not all of them foreseeable right nowHere are three of the more basic consequencesGrids are deadamp8212they were originally designed for paper studies They got a brief reprise when online surveys were done on desktops and they have limped along on mobile devices but their time has comeMultipoint scales are going to be even more awkward and subject to confusion and errorLengthy lists which might be tolerable on a desktop and error prone on a mobile will become an intolerable bore when Alexa reads the 20th item in the listEven if we think of this most basic list of three obvious and unavoidable changes it is clear it will upend our old ways of working and that39s a good thing While we got away with grids complex scales and long lists for a time they were always problematic We should in the interests of quality data and the respondent experience cheer their demiseAs my colleague and I presented these results a few days ago atamp160SampleCon a sample industry conference the audience understood change was necessary but they struggled with how to get clients and colleagues to accept it They could see that this is a not an intellectual challengeamp8212the reality of the need for change is obvious enough This was as one person put it a quothuman systemsquot challenge The challenge is getting people to give up old ways and embrace new ones That39s always hardThere will have to be a great deal of research done to establish how to make sure the results are equivalents across devices We have done some research on research to determine howamp160binary questionsamp160can replace awkward scales foramp160ideaamp160andamp160messageamp160testing But more work remains to be done And there must be convincing evidence that if you forego egregious grids and show people a subset of items that interpolated data is reliable hopefully more reliable than bad grid data And that39s just the start of the listChange will also mean giving up assets people have One of the people at SampleCon represented a company that sells a heritage system for communication testing They have venerable and to them valuable norms The problem is that system won39t work the same way in a world that reflects the way people communicate today It39s last century thinking and it will either need to give up some of the old ways to move with the times or it will be destined for the rubbish bin of history It39s not easy to face those kinds of changes But we mustTo learn more download our whitepaperamp160The Future of Feedback Consumer Interest in New Ways of Doing ResearchLet39s embrace the future of feedbackClick the social buttons above or below to share this story with your friends and colleaguesThe opinions and points of view expressed in this content are exclusively the views of the author andor subjects and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaVillagecomMyersBizNet Inc management or associated writers

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Forget Mobile First --The Future of Research is Device Agnostic

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Andrew Grenville

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Forget Mobile First --The Future of Research is Device Agnostic

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