I’ve just realized that I never posted by last comments from
CASRO Online. Shame on me.
The organizers took the risk of placing three papers on
mobile questionnaire design as the last three papers of the conference and on a
Friday afternoon to boot. The risk paid
off as the room was probably around three-quarters full. The last three papers (from Maritz, Burke,
and Market Strategies) were all reports on experiments with different ways to
present questionnaires on small mobile screens.
All three were very good papers.
After what seems like an eternity of hearing conference speakers talk
about the challenges of the small screen and, in some cases, propose some
potential ways of overcoming those challenges, it was great to see ideas driven
by and tested with data.
I’m not about to announce, “And the winner is. . .” There clearly is more experimentation to be
done and we can expect best practices to evolve over the next few years. But these papers were a great start. Put them together with the
two papers on imputation and data fusion from the first day and you have an
excellent starting point for thinking seriously about mobile questionnaire
design. There were other good papers at
the conference, but to my eye these five papers on mobile where the reason to
be there.
I started this series of posts by describing this conference
as less a place for new ideas than a place to hear the grind-it-out stories of
how new ideas are implemented in the real world. God is indeed in the details. It’s fun to listen to predictions and
visions, to argue about where the industry is headed and how to avoid the fate
of the dinosaurs. But it’s also more
than a little tiring to continually hear the equivalent of “Just Do It.” Getting from here to there is harder than it
looks. One overriding message from the
opening keynote to the last session was that change happens slowly in MR. Just doing it is not enough. It needs to be done right.