By the end of 2013, the number of smartphone, cell phones, and tablets on the planet exceeded the world’s human population. Smartphone traffic grew by 81 percent in 2012 alone. Fifty-six percent of American adults now own a smartphone, and 57 percent of adults use their phone to go online (the number jumps to 79 percent of adults in households with incomes over $75,000). Thirty-four percent of adults own a tablet.33 People carry their lives on their mobile devices, using them to take and store pictures, read news, keep in touch with friends and colleagues, and engage with apps that make their lives easier and more fun. The mobile experience is far more intimate than the desktop experience, and mobile users want to feel that the content that they are consuming on their devices is equally personal. Mobile has the unparalleled capability to reach a customer anywhere, but it also means that an infinite number of distractions compete for his or her attention.
Advantages of Mobile
Today, one quarter of survey respondents prefer to participate in survey research via their mobile devices. This number will continue to rise. The only question is, how fast? With traditional survey research, researchers ask consumers to recall their experiences. Smartphones enable researchers to not only observe consumers’ whereabouts through geolocation, geofencing, and mobile analytics but to ask them for real-time feedback via mobile surveys. Geofencing is the creation of a virtual fence around a location. When a person with a smartphone crosses a geofence, a location-specific survey can be triggered. For example, a person might leave a Macy’s store and be pinged to answer a few questions about the shopping experience. Other questions may focus on each of locating a product, in-store promotional effectiveness, and shopper intent-to-purchase versus just browsing.
Mobile research offers several advantages in addition to intercepting respondents at specific
locations:
Advantages of Mobile
Today, one quarter of survey respondents prefer to participate in survey research via their mobile devices. This number will continue to rise. The only question is, how fast? With traditional survey research, researchers ask consumers to recall their experiences. Smartphones enable researchers to not only observe consumers’ whereabouts through geolocation, geofencing, and mobile analytics but to ask them for real-time feedback via mobile surveys. Geofencing is the creation of a virtual fence around a location. When a person with a smartphone crosses a geofence, a location-specific survey can be triggered. For example, a person might leave a Macy’s store and be pinged to answer a few questions about the shopping experience. Other questions may focus on each of locating a product, in-store promotional effectiveness, and shopper intent-to-purchase versus just browsing.
Mobile research offers several advantages in addition to intercepting respondents at specific
locations:
- Increased response rates. Respondents respond at higher rates (and more quickly) on mobile devices vs. current methods.
- Increased convenience. Respondents have better experiences when they can provide feedback when and where they want to.
- Broader reach. The ability to reach respondents in developing and remote countries creates a huge opportunity to capture insights in those regions.
- Richer content. Respondents can easily share media (e.g., photos, videos, voice recordings, etc.) via mobile devices.
- Broader demographic reach. Respondent cooperation from all demographic groups is higher.
- Immediate feedback. Mobile surveys provide immediate feedback on research questions concerning marketing campaigns, ad testing, and more.
- Cost savings. Researchers receive faster reply to surveys, shorter project completion time.
- Additional options. Use as a mobile recruiting tool to direct respondents to online surveys, or connect with hard-to-reach groups. It is another way of reaching people on the go.
A Few Bumps at the Beginning
Anxious to be a trendsetter, some research firms moved to mobile surveys without a well-thought-out game plan. Simply taking a survey designed for a Mac or PC and converting it to a text-messaging (SMS) format was a recipe for disaster. Responding to a complex, 40-minute, slow-loading survey by typing out the responses led to high incompletion rates. So while mobile research is still quite new, surveys conducted via textmessaging are already scarce. The industry focus has shifted to surveys conducted via WAP or via a survey application designed for a specific phone operating system like an iPhone or Android device.
Both WAP (or web-based mobile surveys) and app-based surveys have their own benefits and challenges. WAP surveys allow for cross-platform text and multimedia surveys (meaning they’re compatible with mobile browsers on multiple operating systems). Device compatibility is over 70 percent. The downside is that mobile browser speed can vary considerably based on the wireless connection. App-based surveys are device-specific (meaning an iPhone app won’t work on an Android phone; thus, multiple versions of the app are necessary to allow for cross-platform research) but generally bring faster delivery and upload times. This may ultimately work to increase respondent satisfaction with the survey-taking process. In addition, survey apps can be developed on and integrated into preexisting apps, which may present marketers with opportunities to add in survey functionality to apps that have served other functions to date.
Gone are the days when surveys had to be programmed and loaded on an actual PC. Today, tablets can easily access surveys and instantly feed data into online reporting toolsets via a basic wireless connection. Researchers are even using tablet PCs to evolve qualitative research into hybrid quant/qual techniques. For example, respondents are given a short quant survey to quantify individual preferences, after which survey results can be instantly aggregated and summarized via real-time online reporting tools. Afterward, a focus group discussion of preference or other drivers can take place, incorporating the initial quantitative survey data into the qualitative group discussion.
Designing a Mobile Survey
Survey designers must be proactive in the design of both the questionnaire and user interface in order to give mobile respondents an excellent survey experience. First and foremost, mobile surveys need to be short. Ten questions or fewer is a good rule. This is because it takes longer to navigate on mobile devices due to limitations of the user interfaces and data transfer speeds. Second, a good mobile survey will minimize the number of pages. Each time the page refreshes, the respondent has to wait. It is important not to put too many questions on a page, as mobile devices also have less memory to work with, so a page with too many elements may cause the device to become slow or nonresponsive.
Third, the type of questions should be kept simple. Single-dimension radio, checkbox, or “select” questions are better than multidimensional grid questions, which could be difficult to complete due to mobile devices’ small screens. Also, limit the use of open-ended questions, as they require typing. Finally, all nonessential content should be minimized. It takes extra load time and visual space for every element that appears on the screen. Even a progress bar increases the load time and the need for vertical scrolling.
The immediacy of mobile surveys, along with geolocation and geofencing, enables a new range of survey incentives. Many companies are offering real-time incentives such as a virtual coupon for the store that you are approaching. The advantages of mobile surveys are illustrated by Toluna, an Internet and mobile marketing research company. A Toluna client wanted to conduct a survey during the Super Bowl regarding the ads that ran during the game. The client wanted to get a read on realtime reactions—but most people who watch the Super Bowl aren’t simultaneously sitting in front of their desktop computers. They are, however, multitasking, using their mobile phones (63 percent of those 18- to 24-year-old smartphone owners in the United States text, use apps, check e-mail, surf the Internet, or participate in social networking discussion while watching TV at least once a week). Only a mobile survey could gather the immediate data that the agency craved. Respondents were recruited in advance of game day and then, during the Super Bowl, surveys were pushed out in real time to ask about commercials as their aired.
Anxious to be a trendsetter, some research firms moved to mobile surveys without a well-thought-out game plan. Simply taking a survey designed for a Mac or PC and converting it to a text-messaging (SMS) format was a recipe for disaster. Responding to a complex, 40-minute, slow-loading survey by typing out the responses led to high incompletion rates. So while mobile research is still quite new, surveys conducted via textmessaging are already scarce. The industry focus has shifted to surveys conducted via WAP or via a survey application designed for a specific phone operating system like an iPhone or Android device.
Both WAP (or web-based mobile surveys) and app-based surveys have their own benefits and challenges. WAP surveys allow for cross-platform text and multimedia surveys (meaning they’re compatible with mobile browsers on multiple operating systems). Device compatibility is over 70 percent. The downside is that mobile browser speed can vary considerably based on the wireless connection. App-based surveys are device-specific (meaning an iPhone app won’t work on an Android phone; thus, multiple versions of the app are necessary to allow for cross-platform research) but generally bring faster delivery and upload times. This may ultimately work to increase respondent satisfaction with the survey-taking process. In addition, survey apps can be developed on and integrated into preexisting apps, which may present marketers with opportunities to add in survey functionality to apps that have served other functions to date.
Gone are the days when surveys had to be programmed and loaded on an actual PC. Today, tablets can easily access surveys and instantly feed data into online reporting toolsets via a basic wireless connection. Researchers are even using tablet PCs to evolve qualitative research into hybrid quant/qual techniques. For example, respondents are given a short quant survey to quantify individual preferences, after which survey results can be instantly aggregated and summarized via real-time online reporting tools. Afterward, a focus group discussion of preference or other drivers can take place, incorporating the initial quantitative survey data into the qualitative group discussion.
Designing a Mobile Survey
Survey designers must be proactive in the design of both the questionnaire and user interface in order to give mobile respondents an excellent survey experience. First and foremost, mobile surveys need to be short. Ten questions or fewer is a good rule. This is because it takes longer to navigate on mobile devices due to limitations of the user interfaces and data transfer speeds. Second, a good mobile survey will minimize the number of pages. Each time the page refreshes, the respondent has to wait. It is important not to put too many questions on a page, as mobile devices also have less memory to work with, so a page with too many elements may cause the device to become slow or nonresponsive.
Third, the type of questions should be kept simple. Single-dimension radio, checkbox, or “select” questions are better than multidimensional grid questions, which could be difficult to complete due to mobile devices’ small screens. Also, limit the use of open-ended questions, as they require typing. Finally, all nonessential content should be minimized. It takes extra load time and visual space for every element that appears on the screen. Even a progress bar increases the load time and the need for vertical scrolling.
The immediacy of mobile surveys, along with geolocation and geofencing, enables a new range of survey incentives. Many companies are offering real-time incentives such as a virtual coupon for the store that you are approaching. The advantages of mobile surveys are illustrated by Toluna, an Internet and mobile marketing research company. A Toluna client wanted to conduct a survey during the Super Bowl regarding the ads that ran during the game. The client wanted to get a read on realtime reactions—but most people who watch the Super Bowl aren’t simultaneously sitting in front of their desktop computers. They are, however, multitasking, using their mobile phones (63 percent of those 18- to 24-year-old smartphone owners in the United States text, use apps, check e-mail, surf the Internet, or participate in social networking discussion while watching TV at least once a week). Only a mobile survey could gather the immediate data that the agency craved. Respondents were recruited in advance of game day and then, during the Super Bowl, surveys were pushed out in real time to ask about commercials as their aired.
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