Understanding game mechanics: Which is the best game Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn?

I have been studying game theory deeply over the last few weeks in my quest to work out how to effectively gamify surveys and I have started to see game play mechanics embedded into all sort of activities.

Just for a bit of fun, well as an invented game in-fact if you look at it this way,  I tried to identify and compare the game play mechanics embedded into Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn to work out which was the best game.

These are some of the basic mechanics of successful games: 

1.  Strict rules
2. A reward mechanism that delivers both pleasure and emotional satisfaction
3.   A well balanced success/failure ratio - An accomplishable challenge
4.  A broad learning curve
5.   A wider competitive element
6. A balance of luck v skill
7. Levels
8. Addiction factor – is it an absorbing activity in itself
9. Team play

How they score...

Pimp my option choices!

In my mind one of the biggest turnoffs for respondents completing online surveys is the utterly uninspiring language we use to write them with.

I have talked in this blog about the impact that taking a more creative approach to how we ask questions in online surveys and how this can improve the quality of responses.

I would also like to challenge the way we think about using option ranges in surveys too. Particularly the over reliance on tired and unimaginative 5 point likert scales.

To me phrases "like how much do you agree or disagree with this statement” or”” how appealing or unappealing is this and “on a scale of 1 to 10” come across like clichés and do nothing to stimulate our imagination of respondents when they are answering questions, lack any real context, often don't fit the range requirements of the question.


These are the 5 questions you need to ask yourself if you want to design more effective range options:

Questionnaire piloting: a user guide

I were to offer one piece of advice to the market research industry on my death bed it would be "do more piloting!".

We have found that effective piloting really can lead to more efficiently executed research so it amazes me that more research companies have not latched on to the value of doing this.

The reasons for this are I think historical. In the days of pen and paper interviews it was simply not a practical option to pilot a piece of research as it would potentially add weeks to the turn-around time of a project and could end up being prohibitively costly, so it never became an established part of survey design protocols.

However, today with the speed of online research, sketching out a survey and piloting it with just 25-50 respondents is something that can be done in a matter of just a few hours and will add nothing to the overall cost of a project. In fact, it could very well save you money in the long run.

This blog post is a short guide to how you can best use piloting to improve your market research...

ARF Great Minds Quality in Research Award 2011

I am pleased to announce that my team at GMI intereactive has won the inaugural ARF 2011 Great Minds, Quality In Research Award for the work we have been doing with Mintel to re-engineer their online consumer brand tracking surveys.

These surveys were re-designed using QStudio our in house flash survey design platform, as a replacement for  existing HTML survey and we managed to dramatically improve both the consumer experience, reducing drop-out by 50% and also improve the quality of data, increasing average click count by 20%.

We will be publishing a full case study explaining the journey we went through to re-engineer these surveys soon.

But in the mean time my team is basking in the glory of winning this award!

 

Game Theory – turning surveys into games

Gamification is clearly a bit of a buzz word in the marketing industry right now and a subject of growing interest amongst market researcher as witness by the enthusiasm this topic generated at the recent NewMR festival web conference organised by Ray Poynter that I was part of.

This is an article I wrote following on from this conference for MrWeb that I am reproducing  that looks at the work we have been doing to explore the role of game play in online surveys.

The Eureka Experiments

We recently conducted a series of experiments looking at how best to stimulate creative thinking within an online survey environment.  Co-creation is a hot topic out there and moderated think tanking is a well established art.  But within the online survey environment it is a very difficult task to get people to think and act creatively, most rely on co-opting large numbers or profiling groups of creative people to come up with ideas.  We wanted to look at how you could stimulate creativity amongst small groups of regular joe respondents and try and develop some practical technique that our clients could use as part of their every day research.

This is a short report on these research experiments.

Sliders: a user guide

The slider question format is a fantastic tool for comparative decision-making, and respondents enjoy using them in surveys if you don't use them in the right way and don't over load the survey with them. The question commonly arises however, as to how the data from slider questions compare to standard range questions. In fact they have been singled out as one of those sexy question that can deliver dangerous answers.

Well a great deal of detailed research has been undertaken into this topic, and so this is a summary of the main issues and a guide to how to effectively use sliders in your online surveys.

Sexy Questions, Dangerous Results?

At the recent NewMR Festival Bernie Malinoff delivered a presentation highlighting some of this issues surrounding the use of more "sexed up" flash question formats in surveys and have noted that this has stirred up quite a bit of follow up commentary and debate in the last few weeks.

As part of these experiments he showed an example of the negative impact of an over elaborate confusing flash format question can have on data quality and the willingness of respondents to take part in future surveys.

Well I wanted to contribute to this debate and so here are my thoughts...

MR Personality test

Do you want to find out what type of market researcher you are?  Well I am developing a market researcher personality test to explore the character traits of different types of market researchers.

This is a link to a prototype version of the survey  and I would love for as many people as possible to take it to set some benchmark norms and give their feedback on what other question I could ask.

survey link

Once I have enough benchmark data I will build the norms into a feedback mechanic so you can see how you score v the rest of the industry...

The 7 power phrases to boost question responses

1. "We challenge you.." : This phrase seems to trigger peoples competitive spirit and when used in the right way you can often farm 2 or 3 times as many answers out of people.

2. "You have 1 minute..":  It causes a bit of a panic reaction amongst respondent but is a great way of encouraging spontaneous thought and whilst 1 minute does not seem much time it is fact 30 seconds longer that the average time a person naturally spend answering an open ended question in most surveys.

3. " In no more than 5 words...":  I don't know why but people like describing things in a few words like this but they do, its quite fun. Again 5 psychologically sounds like you are asking them to limit themselves, but in reality you are actually extending..if you asked people to list words they would use to describe thing you often only get 2 or 3 so 5 is good!

4. "Every little detail helps..": This phrase can help increase the volume of feedback by 10-20% depending on how you use it - ok a relatively small amount by hey - every little helps!

5.  "Because…": Why do you want to know this... because...you may not think it is important to explain what you are doing or why but respondent are often interested and if you let them into your motives you can encourage more active participation.

6." Imagine…": This word takes you all over the place, can can unlock whole new mindsets amongst respondents.  The more imaginatively use use this word the more imaginative the answers you get .  "Imagine  you had £1000 to spend online buying any stuff you liked in the next hour, what would you do..."

7. "This part is voluntary…": This is one of the most powerful phrases you can use in an online survey. It is counter intuitive to make questions voluntary but it is an extremely powerful piece of behavioural psychology that actually can encourage greater levels of active participation.  We have experimented with do this at the end of a quite boring 20 minute survey for the last section we said  "this last part is voluntary..."  Over 90% agreed to do it, mostly I think out of curiosity and what's we found the they spent 60% more time doing the task  versus a control cell who were just asked to do the task anyway.  The psychology of this is that once you have said yes it is an emotional commitment you feel you have made and we are all socially conditioned to do what we say we will do.

Using Greek rhetoric to improve the level of feedback from your surveys

Building "Ethos"  one of the 3 tenents of Greek rhetoric, is the idea of establishing a bond of trust between you and your audience. Aristotle showed out how important this is when you are trying to get people to believe what you say in a court of law or get someone to do something for you and I want to show how you can use aspects of this thinking to help increase the feedback and responsiveness of your market research.

Welcome to my new blog

This blog has been set up to focus on the science of designing surveys. Looking at the best ways to engage and communicate with survey respondents,  how to generate effective feedback from your surveys and exploring new ideas and techniques surrounding online research.

I have set it up with a few articles and obviously hope to build on the content in the coming weeks.  I do welcome any form of feedback, ideas or suggestions for future articles. I hope you find the content of some value.

The inspiration for this has been many of the fantastic market research blogs out their that I have learnt from and enjoyed.  I am a great believer in the open source dissemination of ideas that will help improve the working practices of the industry and I see this as my small contribution to this process.