I have just returned from THE Market Research Event. Yes, that’s how they promote it. I was only there a single day due to some heavy scheduling conflicts but in my limited time I heard a lot about “respondent engagement.” Everybody is indeed talking about it.
Socratic Technologies has been doing a lot of this stuff and in purely technical terms they are doing as good a job at it as anyone. Their demos are worth a look. At the conference they showed some pretty impressive applications with claims of improved focus and better data based in the psychology literature although not much data to back it up.
As readers know, I am a skeptic on this because I think the real problem is not look and feel (in most cases) it’s just surveys that are too long and too boring. As a conference attendee I was sent a link to a survey that had some cool flash built into it. On the screen below I was asked to use my mouse to sort the list of conference features into one of the five buckets based on its attractiveness. The execution was very well done, although preceding screens testing for the right version of Flash and then forcing me to watch a demo of how to do the task made me a bit impatient.
When the time came I charged in, but after I had done what seemed like 20 of these features I began to wonder how long this would go on. As you can see by the screenshot, once I looked the news was all bad. First I noticed that I still had 32 attributes to go! Then I noticed that it threatened another exercise after this one. I missed it in the screen shot, but there was a progress meter in the lower left corner telling me that I was 19 percent complete. So for me, at least, no matter that this was a cool way to answer. The survey was just too uninteresting to me and too long for me to continue. So I bailed out.
I suspect that as time goes by we will see more and more of this kind of eye candy and we probably will do it ourselves because clients will want it. But I just don’t think it solves the real problem here which is that most surveys are too long and too uninteresting for many respondents. What they really want are shorter surveys on salient topics with well written questions. It turns out, that’s a lot harder than you might think.