Reality: Mobile Surveys Will Beat Traditional in 2016
If the current trend continues, then mobile interviews will exceed PC conversion in 2016 further disrupting survey platforms and research designs that aren’t mobile friendly. Ink has been spilt over the onslaught of mobile respondents and the total lack of preparation or even care that research agencies and survey designers have for the user experience. I remember a CASRO Tech in NYC when a researcher suggested that we should ‘keep mobile respondents’ out of surveys lest they mangle norms. All of this reminds me of the challenges political researchers face as the number of cell phone-only households grow. My hunch has been that while progress has been hard to see for a number of years, a lot of good work has been done in the background in 2015 to resolve this problem. When I looked at the data, I found that mobile conversions are close to reaching parity with PC conversions. 2016 is the tipping point.
The suggested improvements to be mobile-friendly break down into a few key areas:
- Interview Length: The mobile respondent session seems ideal for a shorter interview length. With many PC based surveys lasting 15 – 25 minutes, researchers should shorten the interview to match the new environment.
- Survey design: Are the questions and survey-flow taking into account the mobile user in terms of screen size but also usability? For example, complex grid questions are the bread and butter of some survey methods, but are unworkable on mobile.
- Responsive Design: Rendering the traditional survey on the mobile browser can be awful. So introducing responsive design to the survey tool allowing any screen size to be presented well.
How well have buyers and sellers improved the mobile user experience and by what method can we judge the change? We pulled the past two years of data from the Fulcrum Exchange* looking for the difference between the conversion rates of mobile and non-mobile respondents. You’ll see incremental improvements began to accelerate during the second half of 2015.
* all data comes from the Fulcrum Exchange from January 2014 to January 2016 including almost 30 million interviews over 24 months and used by over 200 buyers and 300 suppliers across 80 countries.
Mobile interviews are growing fast
Over the past two years, we saw an increase in the total number of interviews (2.6x overall growth). In that same time frame, the number of interviews from mobile respondents grew by almost 700%. …
… read on at greenbookblog.org
Originally posted by at GreenBook
20th January 2016