Archive for the ‘IdeaStream’ Category

We've been very busy here at Dub,  enhancing the latest version of IdeaStream, our online qual research and digital innovation platform. Built by researchers for researchers, IdeaStream is the result of several years combined research, learnings and technical experience, not to mention the invaluable feedback we receive from our clients. These factors have allowed us to build the most powerful and flexible products on the market, and one that we're incredibly proud of.

The latest version of IdeaStream brings with it a suite of useful developments that no only extend its technical capability, but also the range of methodologies it supports. Over the next few weeks, we are going to share more information about these tools and methodologies with you, and give you a closer look at what makes our work so successful. We'll kick-off this week with a closer inspection of IdeaStream's blog tool, followed shortly by a look at the brainstorm, group discussion, live and quantitative tools IdeaStream has to offer.

OVERVIEW
IdeaStream's blog tool takes inspiration from the behaviours that have been forged over the last 10 years of so by blogging platforms the likes of Blogger and WordPress. Most importantly, a task built using the blog tool is inherently personal. Each person assigned a blog task is effectively being given their own blog. For example, if you are running a project and assign 10 participants the same blog task, you are in effect creating 10 unique blogs - 1 for each person, all controllable from a single administrative dashboard. This differs from, say, IdeaStream's Group Discussion tool, whereby a single 'discussion' that is created is effectively published for all (invited) participants to contribute to.

WHEN AND WHERE
IdeaStream's blog tool is best used when you want to capture personal thoughts, expressions and opinions, or if you want participants to immerse yourselves with the the consumer and have them share  their lives, rituals or habits in detail, using multimedia. Blog tasks can be run for just a few days, requiring only a few posts, or as on-going diaries and journals where participants are required to provide input regularly over time. These can last for weeks or even months.

The multimedia upload capability of IdeaStream's blogging tool means you can offer your participants a wide range of methods to express themselves (within the confines of your area of investigation of course). This can be great for idea generation tasks where participants can use the upload tools to bring their thoughts and opinions to life.

Journals and Diaries
We've already written about the benefits of Digital Diaries as an Online Qual Methodology, but it's worth spending more time extolling the virtues of this immersive and longitudinal study technique that harnesses IdeaStream's blog tool perfectly. Diaries and journals are very personal expressions and accounts, and both benefit from the ability to share text, film and pictures to gain a richer illustration of the participant's life experiences. What's more, as a pre-task, using IdeaStream makes for a much more efficient process in terms of the setup process and administering the exercise to participants. We've all experienced the pain of writing paper diaries, couriering them out to people all over the country (or world), only to have the client change their mind on a whim resulting in the need to repeat the process over again. Doing this digitally means that you can quickly and easily make last-minute changes, as well as allowing you to add new micro-tasks at any time over the course of the exercise.

KEY FEATURES
IdeaStream's blog tool carries a range of features that help researchers deliver the most effective and targeted tasks that achieve the highest possible participation rates. These include the following:

Multimedia tasks
When creating tasks in IdeaStream, Community Managers (Moderators) can upload multimedia in support of the exercise or activity. This can serve two purposes; to visually communicate the thrust of the exercise or two share stimulus that respondents are to review and respond to. In the case of the former, an exceptionally successful technique is have the Community Manager film themselves setting the activity or exercise using the integrated webcam feature. This humanises the task, giving it real character and personality. It also engenders a level of empathy that text-only tasks sometimes fail to do. In turn using this technique increases the level of participation and the quality of posting, and also encourages participants to use their webcams to respond - a rich and very engaging response method.

Social settings
As with all IdeaStream tools, when the Community Manager creates a blog task, they have the option to select a unique social settings for that task. Social settings controls who within the participant community can see content generated by other members, and who they can interact with as they discuss and debate what others have said. The settings available are as follows:

• Social - Output from tasks with this setting can be seen by everyone within the community
• Social within Segment -  Output from tasks with this setting can only be seen by people within the same segment
• Private - Output from tasks with this setting can only be seen by the post author.

So for example, if a blog task is set to 'social', then participants assigned that task will be able to see the content generated by all other participants. The 'Private' setting does the opposite and results in participants only seeing content they themselves have posted.  These vital controls offered by IdeaStream allow researchers to approach areas of investigation in different ways. For example, when discussing subjects of a sensitive or very personal nature,using the 'Private' setting reassures the participant that their responses will be viewed in the strictest of confidence.

Multimedia upload
Like other blogging platforms, IdeaStream's blog tool lets participants post text, pictures and rich video. They can easily embed video from third-party websites like YouTube and Vimeo, as well as recording film using their webcam and uploading fill shot on mobile phones or video cameras. By providing this range of options, IdeaStream opens up an exciting range of methodologies for researchers and innovation experts. For example, the webcam can be used to conduct at-home interviews and thus immerse oneself in the life of the consumer. Another successful technique is to prepare interview sheets (as PDF downloads), and have participants print them off then run through the questions whilst filming themselves using their webcam. Even better, they work with a friend or family member who can interview them.

Probing (private/public)
Essential to online cal research is the ability to probe and interrogate participant's responses. In the digital world, this activity is often referred to as 'commenting'. By default, comments are posed in public, meaning all other participants can see comments administered by Community Managers. IdeaStream also offers the ability for Community Managers to administer 'private' comments, that are only visible to the individual participant. This feature supports the notion that researchers often want to probe with deep, sensitive questions during the course of a study.

Auto-prompting
To help make the life of the researcher and Community Manager easy and more efficient, IdeaStream includes an auto-prompting feature. When the researcher of Community Manager sets up their blog task, they have the ability to activate 'auto-prompts' should the participant fail to respond to the task over a set period of time. If and when participants fail to respond, they receive polite notice and links to the task via their email inbox.

As of this week, Dub's powerful qual research software is available in Mandarin (for both Taiwan and China), Portuguese (for Brazil), Spanish and Bahasa Indonesia. So if you want to reach out further and engage respondents in far away places, and not bias your research by having to conduct your study in English, then get in contact with stephen@dubstudios.com or dan@dubstudios.com

At Dub, we provide local moderators who's role it is to look after the health of your online research community. Part of their role is also to localise the study design for their particular market.

Localising the study design matters greatly, for the reasons that follow;

Appropriateness
To ensure that respondents are familiar with the terms and labels used throughout the discussion guides. Often, making a direct translation from a master document (in English) can lead to the terms having little or no meaning for participants. Fro example, we recently conducted a project about data privacy, but it was deemed that this term meant little when translated for the Asian market, so the resulting term that was adopted was Protection of Personal Information.

Formality
To attain the appropriate level of formality. In some markets around the world, formality will reduce the level of creativity in response, while other markets are more comfortable with a relaxed, casual style (such as Asian and South American markets)

Tone of Voice
When conversing with certain markets, politeness is key to ensuring participation. This is different to formality, as you can be be casual and formal, and polite at the same time.

Equally, localisation can greatly help the flow of discussion and richness of response when handled correctly. Here are some handy hints and tips to follow;

1. Ensure that questions are not ambiguous or more than two questions are combined into one, and adjust the wording of questions to ensure answers are relevant and on-topic. This helps avoid unclear or irrelevant responses.
2. Ensure sequence of questions makes it easy for respondents to follow the progressing discussion and learn more about the topic and what is expected of them in the process. This reduces the likelihood of 'don't know' answers.
3. Adjust the style of questions to local communication preferences. For example, Japanese respondents value harmony and dislike voicing a different opinion, and are less used to analytical thinking and open debate.

At the heart of IdeaStream - Dub's powerful online research community platform - are a range of multimedia uploading and conversation tools that respondents use to share and express their views, opinions and ideas, all in the name of primary research.

All of our engagement tools, which include blogs, forums, questionnaires and polls, are task-based. This means each time a participant interacts, there is a clearly defined purpose and objective to it.

It's important that our clients harness these tools appropriately in order to create the right methodology. A well constructed task that uses the appropriate tool will result in high quality participation and rich responses from engaged participants. To ensure the best possible results, Dub provides support to researchers with the design of tasks.

So far so good. But how do you decide which is the best tool to use from the available options?  In this blog post I'm going to highlight when to use blogs and forums, and the different approaches they offer.

Clients often ask us to explain the difference between blogs and forums, not least because to many, they share the same characteristics. For example, with both these tools in our research software, it's possible for participants to share text, web links, pictures and video. They can also comment on posts left by others. There are, however, some fundamental differences.

Blogs
Each blog task creates a unique blog for individual participants. For example, if you create a blog task that you want the entire group or community to participate in, you will create as many blogs as there are community members. In other words, participant A will be responsible for filling out his blog, while participant B will be responsible for filling out their blog. They can each go and look at the other member's blog and comment on their posts, but they are individual blogs.

A typical example of when to use the blog tool is when you want individual participants to share day-to-day aspects of their lives - in a diary format. The blog tool is also very effective for creative tasks whereby you want participants to bring a product to life - perhaps by creating, naming, drawing and making an advertisement.

Forums
Forum tasks are shared between all participants. As such, no one person is responsible for a forum. If you create a group discussion for all participants to take part in, then you create a forum topic that all members can access and post to. So, participant A will post to, and leave comments on, the same forum as participant B posts to and leaves comments on, and so on.

Forums are excellent when you want a group discussion that is not led by any one individual in particular. For example, if you want participants to share insights around a shared experience - places where they shop, cooking techniques they have picked up, giving advice about a specific topic. Forums are also great when you want to debate topics.

So, in a nutshell, blogs are personal and forums are shared.

If you would like to know more about how Dub can help you deliver creative online research, please get in contact with Stephen Cribbett at stephen@dubstudios.com