Heat Mapping is Here!

We now offer integrated heat mapping – and yes, it works on mobile! You can now add heat map questions to your surveys, focus groups and live chats. Heat mapping is actually 3 new question types:

  1. Heat map: Create an infinite number of categories and have users drop customizable (icon shape, faces, colors) markers on the stimuli. Set min and max for markers as well.
  2. Timed heat map: Measure the time it takes for users to drop each marker (e.g., “where would you click to do X?”).
  3. Sticky note: Just like our regular heat map, but users can ad context to each marker and explain why they placed it as they did.

You can easily test:

  • Creative (advertisements, layouts, etc.)
  • Web mock-ups (not only can you get design feedback, you can even get some quick UX with time-to-task measurement – show Webpage A and ask “where would you click to edit your cart”, then show Webpage B and ask the same (or course randomize the order with our easy page groups and randomization). Compare how long it took to ????nd the “edit cart” button on A vs. B and you have some amazingly fast and powerful UX insights.
  • Text/content (just show an image of the text you want people to reaction to and let them mark what they like, what is confusing and so forth – just like the big white boards for in-person focus groups).
  • Any other images.

Reporting is awesome:

  • View the heat map or raw markers.
  • Change the color scheme for your reporting.
  • Add and remove categories from the heat map.
  • See interactive counts for each category.
  • Click on any comment and the heat map will show you where on the image that comment was made.
  • Create areas-of-interest (AOI) on the fly. Just select the area of the image you want to explore (and shrink or expand the square) and then drag it sound the image to explore and the charting and all associated comments will automatically update to match your AOI.
  • One click to export the heat map with your defined color scheme, AOI and more for easy integration in your reports.

Advanced Logic

Welcome to the new world of easy and automated Advanced Logic. There are a ton of unique use cases, ground breaking technology and applications clients are coming up with every day that we never thought of. So really, feel free to give us a call and ask us questions on this – we are here to help.

As a quick summary here are some of the key features and ways to use our new Advanced Logic:

  • It is simply a WHO, WHEN and WHAT process:
    • Determine WHO you want to apply a rule to – this is where you can set compound logic, set rules (selected at least 3, total = X, etc.), pull from previous segments or tags and more.
    • Tell the platform WHEN you want to trigger this action. That means you can set quotas and have separate actions before and after a quota is hit, trigger the action on a page, after a page group, upon survey completion, termination and so forth.
    • Tell the platform WHAT you want to happen. This is where it gets super cool! You can tag a group, show/hide/skip logic, redirect to custom links outside the platform, invite to a follow-up activity, hide data, pay incentives and more.
  • No complicated coding, but natural language instructions – easily set your rules and logic with common sense rules.
  • Create on-the-fly “segments” and then re-use those segments anywhere in the survey for easy compound rules and logic.
  • Create rules and logic from ANY other data source in the platform! Want to only show page 3 of the Brand Survey to those that said they were “female” in their profile AND who chose product X in the Product Survey last year? – no problem.
  • Choose from multiple pre-coded options including “any of”, “none of”, “select at least X of Y”, “sum is” and many more.
  • Custom quota creation – allowing you to trigger any activity or action based upon quota triggers.
  • See a beautiful visual summary of all your coding logic, right there in-line on the page and even test your logic and see who falls into which segments, pages and activity flow.
  • And, tons more.

Here are a few example screen shots.

Insight Communities – To Incentivize or Not To Incentivize

We get a lot of questions about whether or not to provide incentives when it comes to online insight communities. And the answer is? Drumroll please…well, it depends.

Our typical advice is we don’t like “pay-to-play” – it provides the wrong incentive structure and invites the wrong people and activities. However, research should not be about trying to suck as much data from respondents as quickly and cheaply as possible either – you get what you pay for! But, “pay” can come in many forms. It can be cold hard cash, interacting with fellow community members with similar interests, seeing your feedback and ideas come to life and simply knowing that your feedback is being heard.

Our recommendation is to build a community based around altruistic reasons to join and participate – “Hey, help us make the products and services you personally use better – really we are listening!” And, then from there be fair with people’s time – pay them as you would anyone else providing a valuable service when asking for significant chunks of time.

Below are a few factors to consider when determining if it makes sense to incorporate monetary incentives in your online research activity:

  • Activity length/time commitment – When you ask a participant to complete a longer activity, an incentive will help sustain their participation and ensure reliable and better-quality responses. If a participant can provide feedback very quickly or easily, an incentive may not be necessary.
  • Your audience – Is this is a case where participants are already intrinsically motivated to join the conversation? For example, your customers or employees may be more intrinsically motivated to respond to a survey than just your average Joe. The same is true for communities where members have a very strong affiliation with the brand/product/subject matter and will participate out of love for a product, brand or having the ability to interact and learn from their peers.
  • Activity type – What are participants going to do? If you are asking complex questions or questions that require a lot of thought, an incentive can help boost participation and it’s only fair to compensate someone for significant time or effort.
  • The alternatives – Monetized incentives shouldn’t be the only weapon in your arsenal. In a perfect world, you’d want engagement to be the main driver of participation. Consider using intangibles to add value to your community (e.g., Look what we’ve done with your feedback, etc.). It is important that participants are being listened to and feel they are making a difference. Be sure to let the community know they are heard– rewards are just the cherry on top of the insight pie!

How much? How much? How much? As with a traditional focus group, the incentive amount will vary with the type of participant and how much you are asking them to do. We have found that incentives (ranging from $5 to $25) given at regular intervals to each member who qualifies and successfully completes an activity. This normally amounts to about $1/minute.

We hope you have found this helpful – let us know your thoughts and ways you have found to be successful when it comes to incentivizing an insight community (both monetary and non). No incentive will be provided for your feedback to this blog post.

Updated Live Chat – Now with Quant

We knew as soon as we released our sweet, easy live chat module this would happen…someone would ask – “Can I put survey questions in there?” The answer is YES! So, is it a chat with survey questions or is it a survey with live chat to probe on the survey responses? The answer is both.

  • Easily ask survey questions as part of your Live Chat session
  • See the data roll in with real-time charting and respondent level data
  • Easily probe and chat around the question, even share results with respondents so they can discuss them as a group
  • Mix and match chat questions and survey questions
  • Include video, images and documents as part of any question
  • Contact us for a live demo to see just how easy it is.

Digital Journals Are Here

We invite you to meet our new Digital Journal module. At a high level, it is really very simple – allow a respondent to answer the same set of questions multiple times. We basically built our Journal module just like a Journal; it has pages, and you can write on those pages and add more pages as needed. For us the “pages” are a survey that a user can take again and again over any set period of time. This allows you all the power of our survey building including any question type, skips and logic, and more. The respondent gets a consistent, easy experience, and you get an easy way to gather ongoing feedback – call it a Digital Journal (we do!), digital diaries, field ethnography, you get the idea. The bottom line is this module allows you to easily collect any type of data (surveys, text, images, video) in an ongoing, flexible environment across any device.

So, we made it easy to get lots of awesome data from people over time, but how do you view and interact with that data? Glad you asked! Reporting on Digital Journals was a major focus for us. You can quickly get a ton of data (images, videos, text responses and data) across multiple people, over short or long periods of time – typically not an easy task to browse, review, filter and export. We fixed all of that:) We allow you to view aggregated data across all responses and journal entries in a seamless report view, provide individual respondent transcript views, filter by journal entry date, user, or question, and view all media in a beautiful interactive user uploaded media library (and even filter user uploaded media by user, date or question and easily export).

You can use Digital Journals a ton of ways, but here are a few ideas: shopping and coupon usage studies (coupon tracking, shop-alongs, etc.), rich media immersion (e.g., post a pic or video of your dinner each night for the week), daily activity surveys, customer experience services and lots more – let me know your ideas.

Please let us know any questions at all.