Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category

Online qualitative research is maturing fast, and there's a huge range of live and asynchronous tools on the market for researcher to use, including our own best-in-class asynchronous application, IdeaStream. But we're not posting this to discuss the merits of our own tools and apps, we want to learn more from you, researcher, as to what you like and dislike about the 'live' focus group tools you've used. What works, what doesn't, what are their limitations, what would you change or add given the chance. All these questions and more...

We're compiling some research into what you want from your live focus group tools. Share your views and opinions, and learn from experience of others. We'll be compiling a report of the findings and sharing them with valid contributors here at a later date, thus helping you can make informed decisions.

To join the debate, simply answer the questions below as comments to this post.

Q1: If you could design your ultimate live focus group tool, what would be the top three features you'd include?

Q2: Considering your experience of live focus group tools, what have been the least useful features, the ones you could live without?

Q3: What features do you get most excited about, only to find out they don't do what you expected of them?

Q4: What's the most common technical problem experienced by respondents during the live focus groups you've run to-date?

Q5: What features are most useful when analysing the data gathered?

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

We're extremely proud of all of the online research technology that we've developed over the years. It facilitates a more creative online research experience for both respondent and researcher. One of the most effective and much heralded tools that we've integrated, however, is also the simplest and easiest to use (hence our pride in it!). It's called Notes. The simplest way to describe it is like Delicious for researchers.

Notes, allows researchers and admins to annotate, share and discover respondent-generated content. As an online research project progresses, researchers and admins can add notes to the most valuable content they see, so they can return to and/or share their thoughts and ideas with others, with ease.

Researchers and admins also create meta-databases with Notes. These generate tag clouds that help uncover trending topics. Researchers can also add notes-to-self, helping to remind them about the best content they have seen.

Our clients tell us that they love Notes, not just because of its ease-of-use, but because it saves them time at the end of projects when they need to review the content for analysis. Online research (including communities, MROCs) can produce a vast amount of data, so it's important to create mechanisms that allow researchers to organise, search and filter content. Notes fulfils this and more by removing the need for your project's Senior Analyst having to sequentially review all the data shared.

If you'd like to know more about how Notes can improve your online research, contact Stephen Cribbett, stephen@dubstudios.com

At last week's Social Media World Forum (#smwf), Andy McLoughlin, co-founder of Huddle, gave a stirring presentation about their business, why and how it came to be, and why collaborative, on-demand solutions are the future.

Here's the presentation in full (courtesy of my shiny new Flip camera - I love it!)

A bit like the new book Rework, by 37signals, that I reviewed recently, this was a must-see talk for small businesses, and a valuable lesson that often the most successful businesses are founded to 'scratch your own itch', or solve a problem that blights you personally in everyday life. In Huddle's case it was how to work in teams and collaborate remotely with co-workers, without the need for email.

Another experiment in how to work sans email is being conducted by Luis Suarez over at IBM. Luis is 2 years, yes 2 years, into his experiment and has successfully reduced his inflow of emails to an average of just 14 a week. If ever there was a supporting case for the adoption of social software, this surely must be one of the most compelling!

Engadget, one of the leading gadget blogs on the internet, recently decided to turn off commenting on articles. Their claim is that in in recent days commenting has got 'out of hand', with a few people creating an environment that they feel is 'ugly, pointless and threatening'.

It's a bold move, and one I suspect they did not take lightly. By their own admission, and inline with the oft cited 1% rule, only a small percentage of their readership comment. However, the feature is considered one of the basic tenants of social media - allowing motivated readers to become part of the debate. Indeed, it's features like commenting, along with the low barriers to entry, ability to syndicate across multiple platforms/channels, etc. that have helped the format grow to the size, variety and popularity it has today.

Benefits aside monitoring comments, filtering out the spam and ensuring abuse is kept at bay can be a difficult process. Blog authors have options, which include:

• Moderation - before a comment is displayed online, it must be 'cleared' by a site administer, ensuring no detrimental posts get through. However, this can take away the immediate gratification users have come to expect and cause commentors to feel they're being censored. Such a process also becomes unfeasible for a site that is as popular (and has such a high number of generated comments) as Engadget.
• Spam filters - Great for some removing the 'v1Agra' type of spam message we have all come to despise, but limited when it comes to deciding if a well composed comment is inappropriate
• Community-managed voting - only displays comments that have been given a positive vote by readers. Very 'hands-off' for site owners, but requires an extra level of interaction from users
• Register to vote - Great for blogs with a small following - e.g. personal holiday blogs, but becomes difficult to track with large and manage with large user base. Equally, as user names and passwords are required each time, barriers to entry for commenting (especially for casual commentors) become very high
• Threading - this allows people to comment on comments. It doesn't stop spam comments, but it does conversations to diverge. Sites like Slashdot take this approach to the extreme, allowing unlimited 'threading'. The side effect is that this can quickly become confusing to the casual observer. Limited threading is a useful

Our advise at Dub is to try and take maximum advantage of the medium and be as open to viewer comments as possible. As you can see, there are a myriad approaches to helping mange comments. Unfortunately, for some publishers all the options in the world can't stop the trolls and spammers of this world.

Read Engadget's full statement here

Given all the excitement and media attention that Steve Jobs' new gadget has received, we thought we'd get our tech leader, Sam Regan, to review it. Here's what he had to say...

The iPad is an interesting foray in to the tablet market. Apple are claiming they are creating a new category of device. However, in reality it's just marketing hyperbole. The category has already existed, all be it with little success outside of niche use. What they have achieved is to bring legitimacy to the form factor, something Apple has a proven record of delivering.

From a hardware perspective the device falls short. Commonly used interfaces are missing: SD / Micro SD storage, proper USB device connection, camera and video being the most obvious.

It's the user-interaction that is exciting. The device will enable people to share online content and media while in the same physical location. we all know the pain of showing holiday photos with others; standing around the laptop or PC. The iPad will simplify this and make the experience much more pleasurable and engaging - flipping the device and having photos re-orientate themselves automatically for example.

Equally, I can see multi-player gaming being quite exciting on this whether you are in the same room as your opponents or not. The replacement of board games such as Chess or Scrabble immediately spring to mind. Interactive-learning between a parent and child is not to be underestimated with such a tool, not to mention how much fun research could become - no more boring surveys!

In reality it's an over-sized iPhone (or iTouch) but it's the scaling up into a device that more than one person can use at the same time that really gets me interested.