When People Take Surveys on Smartphones

It amazes me that so many marketing research surveys are not responsive and optimized for mobile devices. I understand why they are not optimized, as decent mobile surveys are hard to design, and no, all the junk platforms that tout mobile optimization are not good options. But if you’re hiring a research or consulting firm, shouldn’t they be at the forefront of making your survey easy and accessible for the people you rely on (your respondents!) to supply data?

The answer is yes. And the other thing they ought to be doing is helping you monitor academic research-on-research to keep abreast of how mobile capabilities affect surveys, and therefore how they affect your data and research findings.

Here are some of the latest nuggets of insight we came across in a recent issue of Survey Practice:

1. Smartphone respondents mostly complete surveys from home

2. Smartphone respondents are more likely to have friends, family, or colleagues around them when they complete a survey, but even so, most of them are alone

3. If smartphone respondents do have others around them, they do not perceive the privacy of the survey as being compromised, and there is no difference in how they respond to sensitive questions

4. If a survey is not responsive and adaptable to mobile devices, data quality from smartphone respondents is significantly lower

5. Smartphone respondents are just as willing to answer open-ended questions as desktop users, but they type in quite a bit less information

6. Smartphone respondents take longer to complete surveys

7. Smartphone respondents tend to pick items at the top of a list to avoid having to scroll down

Wow, if you are trying to design a valid and reliable survey, these are things you need to know! Half or more of consumers now complete surveys on smartphones rather than desktops. Smart research must continually adapt to account for trends like these.

By the way, all of our surveys at Versta Research are programmed on a sophisticated platform with excellent (and beautiful) capabilities for mobile. In addition, we aggressively test on mobile devices of different sizes and operating systems. Work with us, and we promise you’ll always be at the forefront of what you need to know.

By Joe Hopper, Ph.D.

OTHER ARTICLES ON THIS TOPIC:

Using SMS Texts for Surveys

Yes, You Can Use Grids on Mobile Surveys

Scrolling vs. Paging on Mobile Surveys

1 in 3 Research Firms Fly Blind with Mobile