Bonsai Survey Design

This blog post below is the first in a series I am writing to accompany a paper I am about to publish on Bonsai Survey design, which will be presented at the up coming ESOMAR Asia Pacific event in May 2014.

There is a pressing need in our industry to shorten survey to meet the needs of the mobile enable research consumer.  More and more people are wanting to complete surveys on their mobile phones, yet the average online market research survey we currently produce is too long and unwieldy to actually complete on a mobile device.  So surveys have to change to accommodate this. They have to become shorter, more engaging and better designed and this paper is a guide to how to navigate your way though this process.

We are also going to produce a small "Bonsai" book to accompany this paper which I am excited about.

We have recently analysed over 30,000 surveys that GMI respondents have been asked to complete over the last 18 months around the world and the average length of survey, and I stress the word average, is 20 minutes.   The attention span of someone using a mobile phone is around 5 minutes for any one activity.  So there is a big gap to close.  

I estimate that less that 1 in 5 surveys right now is adequately optimized for mobile phone completion.  So my big focus over the last few months has been to explore practical ways in which surveys can be shorten and to establish a framework that our client can use to address this issue.

I hope in these future blog posts to highlight some of the most effective technique that you can share with your own clients as to how to make surveys shorter and more effective.