Who can resist those flashy brain image scans showing that certain words, colors, images, or brands (or maybe your latest marketing message) magically light up consumers’ brains, presumably making them want to buy? Or, if you’re a cynic, who can resist sharing with colleagues the brain image scan of a dead salmon showing brain activity…
Last year, Gartner, which charts new trends and emerging technologies via its “Hype Cycle” tracking, decided to abandon its tracking of Big Data. The reason? Big data, they said, has become so ubiquitous and embedded in so many other technologies, that it is no longer a thing of its own. And yet, how many of…
We read the most irritating claim about focus groups several weeks back, which inspired us to begin writing about why it was so wrong. But we realized somebody else could do it better than we could—a true expert on focus groups who built a thriving research business by conducting focus groups (among other qualitative methods)…
Here we are on Global Accessibility Awareness Day, which makes it a perfect time to answer the question: “What in the world do we mean by accessible surveys?” Our last newsletter (How to Make a Survey ADA Accessible) outlined the important steps needed to begin developing such surveys. But it’s worth stepping back from the…
If you are a consumer-facing company deploying online surveys of your customers, accessible surveys will likely be on your agenda in the next couple of years. Accessible surveys incorporate unique design features so that people with disabilities who use assistive technologies can participate as fully as others. With the need for survey accessibility growing and…
Whenever I write a research report, I feel strongly ambivalent about flagging data as “statistically significant.” If possible, I try to avoid it altogether. Why? Because p-values and concepts of statistical significance are often misunderstood, misused, and misleading. Indeed, the problem is so prevalent that one well-respected scientific journal in social psychology (Basic and Applied…
One of the weirdest things about research is how the everyday nature of our work keeps changing as a result of the problems we solve. A colleague on the corporate side recently shared an observation that I found unsettling: With her customer experience research now fully automated, even down to the “analyses” via quick dashboard…
Once a year we schlepp out the Google Analytics (yes, with good reason, only once a year—perhaps a topic for a future article) to find out what you, dear readers, are paying attention to. Traffic is higher than ever. During the last twelve months there were 383 visits per week to our website. But that…
There are good reasons to avoid phone surveys if you can. But if there is no alternative, it is critical to think about strategies for integrating cell phones into your outreach and sampling. Almost half (48%) of U.S. adults have no landline telephone service, while fewer than one in ten (9%) have no cell phone…
Or, at least, design thinking should be invading your market research, because it is invading the brains of business executives. The New York Times describes IBM as being on a mission to hire 1,500 design school graduates, and embedding them in all of its product teams. The Harvard Business Review published an issue in September…