Every year I read the university catalogues for summer coursework in research methods and share a few recommendations with colleagues and clients. If you are looking for more than just the information and inspiration you get from conferences, look to the substance and depth you can get from a classroom. It’s easier than you might…
For every research rule or best practice I proclaim, I find myself doing the opposite eventually. Such is the case with pie charts. I try to avoid them, taking to heart Edward Tufte’s claim that they are dumb and should never be used. Studies show that pie charts do a poor job helping readers grasp…
In the months leading up to this year’s Supreme Court ruling on marriage equality, Wells Fargo worked with Versta Research on a national survey of LGBT Americans. The goal was to understand how changes in marriage laws were affecting decisions about money and marriage. What did we learn about LGBT Americans? Here are two nuggets…
Tomorrow we’re giving a talk at LIMRA’s annual Marketing and Research Conference in Baltimore. The topic? Creating spectacular infographics for market research. It builds upon our Newsletter article from last July, and upon our subsequent top-five article in Quirk’s. And thanks to our own Peter Kowalski, who has extraordinary talent designing infographics for research,…
Venn diagrams are useful conceptual tools, which is why business people love them, and why programs like Word and PowerPoint incorporate them into their suite of “smart art” tools. But as useful as they are conceptually, Venn diagrams are also maddeningly tricky and problematic for data visualization. One reason is that accurate Venn diagrams are…
Having just returned from giving a presentation at the Advertising Research Foundation’s annual conference, Re:Think 2015, I learned that ARF’s “Ground Truth #2” is that brands are built in the brain. As such, the ARF has invested a good deal of time and money over the last decade exploring ways that neuroscience can be applied…
Every year I peruse the listings of summer college training courses on research methods. Part of it is nostalgia—I loved school. But I’m also looking for courses that will keep me and our Versta employees at the forefront of new knowledge and research techniques. (I didn’t learn R in graduate school, so yes, I took…
When we published our July 2014 newsletter on How to Make Spectacular Infographics, we spent some time looking for examples of poorly done infographics. Ultimately we decided to focus only on the positive “what-to-do” for infographics instead of the negative “what-not-to-do,” so we set those examples aside. Well, along comes the latest news magazine from…
This week, after nine months of intensive study and practice, we published our Summer 2014 Newsletter with a feature article on How to Make Spectacular Infographics. It offers tips and tricks and some how-to insights. It is based on a company-wide internal initiative launched last fall to develop an infographic summary of research findings for…
Versta Research has just published is spring 2014 newsletter which features a short video on how to do pricing research. If you ever work with price and demand data, and need to figure out the optimal price for your product or service, here are two great tools worth knowing about: 1. PowerPoint (yes, that says…