Our Director of Operations and Programmatic, Guy Wates, has spent time during his career on both the supply and buyer sides of the market research marketplace. This gives him a unique perspective when it comes to what is happening in the industry - a perspective that he shares in his latest piece for Quirk’s called “It’s time to improve the user experience for research participants.”

In the article, Guy writes about changes he’s seen in the industry over the years, and where we should be looking to achieve efficiency and data quality. He warns about quick fixes and automated solutions that can cause respondents to be treated like a commodity and result in poor user experiences. “The fact of the matter is that it's not really that great to be a respondent...We shouldn't ponder why we see some of the quality issues we see in our industry.”

Admitting that both sides of the marketplace have had a hand in this new reality, Guy proposes specific best practices that can start to repair the broken system, drive participation back up and boost quality. It starts with the user experience every step of the way. In the complete article, he goes into several topics in depth that can help achieve our goals, including better profiling, eliminating routing, and making the entire survey experience shorter and optimized for multiple devices. These tasks should be coupled with fair rewards for participation, full transparency about the research and a privacy-first approach that gives people control over their own data. 

At Measure, we believe that research built with these concepts in mind can deliver superior user experience for the participant. And that great experience leads to the participant trusting the researcher which leads to participation -  and participation for the right reasons. This in turn leads to better quality data and to the researcher trusting the participant. In a nutshell, poor user experience leads to erosion of trust which is not good for the research industry.

Guy concludes his Quirk’s article by referencing our recent research into trust principles, writing that: “Trust is the new oil for a lot of businesses and it’s fundamental we have it in research. We’ve observed better quality in all fronts in an app environment built on these trust principles. Participants experiencing these principles take more time over tasks, pay more attention and are less likely to overclaim in surveys. Our recent research on this shows how quality can be improved by focusing on the long-term respondent experience. It’s time for a change, on both sides of the marketplace.” 

For the complete article, visit: https://www.quirks.com/articles/its-time-to-improve-the-user-experience-for-research-participants