Onboarding is a term usually found in HR circles used to describe the mechanism through which new employees obtain the skills and knowledge to do the job and become good employees. Here at Dub, we use the term to describe the process of getting people logged into an insight community for the first time, and making sure they have everything they need to complete the activities set them.

Why is onboarding is important?

Most insight communities have certain time pressures. Members will have been recruited one way or another, and with an associated cost. This means you want to get the most from them in terms of their time and focus engaging with the activities you’ve spent a lot of time and thought designing. The shorter term insight communities create greater pressure on the need to have members logged in and ready to go at the earliest opportunity. You don’t want to waste the first few days of your community helping people who can’t logon or who have difficult remembering a password they themselves created! (Believe me, this happens a lot!).

So with someone in your team responsible for the task of getting people logged on and ready to go come the first activities, you’ll maximise your engagement, reduce support costs and have much happier members ready and willing to give it their all.

Who should do the onboarding?

It’s not that you need to have a dedicated person with the sole responsibility of on boarding, but it helps if you define the role clearly, create some basic guidelines and assign one or two people in your team, or even in your external support team. Dub can help you with this, and from what we’ve seen to-date, it really makes a difference and removes a lot of headaches.

What about off-boarding?

Getting your members up and running is one thing, but doing a good job of closing down the community is another, equally important task. Always thank people for the time – during the community as well as at the end – and share some of the key insights with them. Offer them the chance to share their community experience with you – you might learn some new tricks that help will help you motivate the next community you run. And where you are paying cash incentives, make sure they are paid out quickly, otherwise you risk the wrath of members eager to spend their hard-earned cash at the weekend!

If you’d like to understand how Dub can help you get participants on board, contact us@dubishere.com or call +44 (0) 20 7247 3327 or +1 310 997 5779

Teens can be one of the least reliable when it comes to conducting any kind of qualitative research and online qualitative is no exception.  Hours can be wasted trying to track them down to complete a series of activities in a quality fashion.  The key to all of this is bringing the activities to them.

One thing we do know is that teens are online – all of them, all the time.  They’ve also never known a pre-internet (and smartphone) world, so communicating online is as natural for them as talking.  But just knowing they’re online isn’t enough.  We need to understand how they communicate, where they communicate and what motivates them to communicate beyond the normal monetary incentives.  It’s as equally important to recognize their limitations.

No surprises

Without giving away too much about the research, teens and their parents should be given an overview of the activities and what’s required at the recruiting stage.  This prevents people from over promising when they’ve got too many additional commitments through school, sports or other activities.  It also allows them to plan if you need to see them in action with their friends or family.  Research projects fall down the list of priorities when real life competes.

Social activities: a great way to share and connect

Teens with similar interests are eager to connect with each other and comfortable in online forums.  They are used to conversations that are presented as threaded.  That said, satisfying a research goal isn’t going to be their primary motivator.  They will want to present themselves, see what others have to offer and how they stack up against their peers.  Consider making all activities, that aren’t sensitive in nature, social – but only let them see what others are saying after they post about themselves.  This can easily be accomplished on IdeaStream^tm through the use of our online blogs and discussion boards.  If you tell them they will be able to browse through other posts, videos and comments after they complete their activity they will be more motivated to complete.

Why won’t they finish the last three activities???

One frustration I hear about constantly is the loss of interest from teen participants.  Halfway through the project, response rates dwindle and no amount of money seems to be able to change that.  While discussing how to approach this, one researcher suggested launching all activities (or most activities) at one time – allowing them to chose the ones they want to complete and in what order they’d like to do it.  They’re told upfront that they must finish three-quarters of the exercises in order to receive their incentives.  This puts them in control.  She indicated that more often than not, all respondents ultimately end up completing all the activities.  This idea seems to make sense if you are flexible with how you can structure your research.

A teen and their phone – The love story

It’s no secret a mobile phone is a teens best friend.  From texting, tweeting, organizing friends and sharing media, phones provide a way for teens to reach out to their inner circle and to the masses.  IdeaStream^tm Mobile allows us to reach into their worlds with similar ease.  Not only does mobile allow you to capture ‘in the moment’ insights but it removes barriers to getting information from them in the form of text, video and pictures.  Whether they are sitting in their room at night, on a break at school or out with their friends – we can reach them and they can reach us.  Don’t be afraid to ask them to get creative with these tools – use them in conjunction with other technologies and most importantly – make it fun!

Using sequencing as an incentive

People like immediate gratification – especially teens.  You can build a reward system into your research through sequencing.  Consider locking special games, polls or privileged information behind an activity you really need them to complete.  Response rates shoot way up when a perceived reward is available immediately.

At the end of the day – Kids will be kids

Teens are more independently minded and have greater purchasing power than ever before, but alas they are still kids.  They live in a world where their attention is being competed for by any number of outside sources – so patience and perseverance is key.  Hopefully some of the suggestions we list above can make this road a bit less bumpy for you.

Dub today announced the launch of it’s Global Moderator Network. The network is intended to connect online qualitative moderators and insight community managers with opportunities that come out of Dub’s client base. Projects and communities may be short or long term, and require a multitude of language and methodological skills.

To join this thriving network, follow this link and submit your request. Once joined, be encouraged to start discussions and watch out for new project bids.

If, like many of the MR agencies and independent researchers out there who have successfully been running short-term research communities (MROCs), you’re thinking about selling in a long-term community to your clients, you’re probably contemplating how to create a package that your client can a) easily understand, and b) easily buy. This post offers you some helpful tips and hopefully see you on your way to converting your first long-term research community.

First of all, the basic ingredients of a research community are as follows:

• An important part of your initial preparation for readiness is to find web-based community platform (we can of course help you there!). Then add the following….
• A pinch of stakeholder management
• A teaspoon of recruitment
• A drop of moderation
• A large dollop of Community Management
• A tablespoon of research design
• A large handful of analysis
• And finally, some kick-ass reporting capabilities

Once you’re confident you’ve got these ingredients ready, you need to think about how you can put a package together that will make sense to your client and is easy for them to ‘buy’, but one that also manages risk and is something you can deliver (naturally). The easiest way to come at this is as I’ve seen many agencies do it, and that’s by having 1) a startup package that get the community going, and includes defining the strategy, recruiting members etc, 2) a consistent package that’s governed monthly, plus 3) bolt-on ad-hoc elements that the client can opt for should they want to find answers to questions they didn’t initially consider at the briefing. These three elements can be summarised as follows:

1) Community Design
Like any agency assignment, research-oriented or otherwise, there’s an initial period whereby you get to know your client, their business, the challenges they face (cultural, financial, market etc) and what questions they want answered. Given this is research, you’ll also be exploring where the community members are going to come from, their profile and what methods you are going to use to find them and subsequently get them into the community itself.

How the community will communicate with its members is also something to define here, including tone of voice, frequency, medium etc. And you’ll also want to consider the creation of what can be know as ‘Community Guidelines’ which set out how members should behave and what’s expected of them, among other things.

This is the time to think long and hard about how you are going to answer the incredibly important question ‘What’s in it for the members?’. You’ll be wise to contemplate intrinsic and extrinsic motivations, the former including status, membership, spending time with like-minded people etc, and the latter cash, prizes, points etc.

The identity of your research community is vitally important, so you may want to involve members themselves in this process. Decide on whether it’s branded (with your end clients identity), or whether it’s more focussed on topic area. The tone of voice should reflect this, as should the interface design and visual identity.

Finally, you’re probably going to want to design some of the initial tasks and activities before the community actually launches. My advice is keep it simple to begin with, so that members can warm up gradually. Get them talking about themselves – after all, we all love doing just that – then start delving deeper into the more involved activities.

Of course, there’s a lot of other stuff that goes on during this stage, but this is just a guide so make sure you do your homework and don’t just apply a cookie-cutter approach to this stage.

2) Monthly Package
As a guide to what your monthly package and the scope might shape up like, start with any ongoing community hosting fees (of the technical nature). You’ll want to be sitting down or at least liaising with your clients once a month to find out what strategic and possibly tactical issues they have coming up. This is a most important aspect of running successful long-term research communities since this is where you’ll develop the glue that holds it all together.

Then, as it’s likely you’ll be running a consistent number of tasks and activities that help deliver the answers your clients is looking for, include your research design, moderation, community management, and analysis and reporting requirements. In terms of reporting, there are many varied ways you can report findings and insights to your clients. There are the more traditional methods whereby Powerpoint-style presentations are compiled. But given the digital nature of the the insights, agencies are using more interactive and collaborative methods to disseminate them. Our own HeadsUp™ research portal is one such tool to get wider engagement and more active collaboration with clients. I’ve also seen digital insight channels whereby agencies are using advanced video reduction techniques to get their message across (and those of the consumer!).

Include in your monthly package incentive handling and fulfilment. You’re also going to experience a natural drop-out so include some time and cost for topping up membership.

3) Ad-Hoc Research Activities
Given that you’ve got a community of people that can be on call 24/7, it makes sense to get the most from them by including the possibility for ad-hoc research i.e. that which falls outside the monthly deliverables outlining above. The range of ad-hoc projects may include surveys and polls through to more interactive, immersive exercises that deliver against more strategic issues. Each will require its own unique level of moderation and reporting, so take care to factor in these and any further client stakeholder management if the questions are coming from an area of the business outside of the research team.

Further reading to help you on your way with your first research community include:

My Love Hate Relationship with Online Qual: Avoiding the Pitfalls
Long Term Community Pointers
Why Using Panelists Doesnt Always Make for Great Onlien Qual Research
How to Convince CLients To Run With Online Qual and MROCs

If you need help planning your first research community or would like to know how Dub’s pioneering research community platform can help deliver your requirements, contact Stephen Cribbett in the UK on +44 20 7247 3327 or Kerry Hecht in the US on +1 310 997 5779

Online qual research can be a blessing in disguise, especially when your client is pressed for time and money (which happens more often than we’d like).  Or it can be a monster hiding under the bed, creeping up, waiting to take you by surprise. If planned properly and designed for the right challenge, you can glean tons of useful insights and learnings from respondents.

My very first experience with online qual research was a global study of youth culture and action sports across nine countries for a shoe and apparel brand.  The two-week online study was the first-phase of qual research, and was followed-up with in-home ethnographies and focus groups.  The best online respondents were invited for in-person interviews.  On paper, the design seemed to be ideal and our planning seemed to logistically make sense.  But, as always with research, there were surprises.

First, our sample number was rather large – 120 respondents for 100 completes.  This didn’t seem like a problem, especially when spread across four US cities. However, the type of people we were looking for (Skaters, BMXers, Surfers, Street Artists) were difficult to find, and more unorthodox recruitment efforts were deemed necessary.  This recruitment issue made it difficult to focus on the actual research.

Second, although the sample was younger and more Internet-savvy, they were also more laid-back and carefree, making task deadlines unconvincing.  Many wouldn’t complete the study even when offered more cash.  Definitely a first in my book!

Third, the large sample size became our biggest nightmare as we included several video tasks in the design.  Since we didn’t provide any “firm guidelines” for the length of the video, we were left with videos lasting anywhere from 5 to 30 minutes long from at least half of the respondents for three tasks.  Do the math – that’s quite a bit of video to watch – and that didn’t include all of the other written tasks they were assigned.

The large sample size combined with an enormous amount of data led to a lot of late nights and re-organizing.  Since there were 8 other markets that followed, we had to make sure we wouldn’t make similar mistakes.  These were classic amateur mistakes – but with smart planning and design – you can avoid these roadblocks.

Online qual’s blessing is that it enables researchers to reach hard-to-find consumers across many markets, and to gain breadth AND depth from the learnings. Although my first experience with online qual seemed like a nightmare, I learned from it and used my experience to design better online studies.

By and large, the online qual methodology works best when:

• It’s the first phase of exploratory qual research to better understand an industry/culture before diving into in-person research.  This will help shape your hypothesis and the discussion guide for in-person research.
  • But that doesn’t mean that you can’t conduct qual research that solely uses online research. Although consumers can be more candid and honest when they are doing it behind the computer, there are certain topics that potentially encourage people say one thing and then do another (i.e. fitness, dieting, exercising, eating behavior).   Since this issue isn’t exclusive to online qual –you must trust your instinct.
• You need to understand how consumers feel and think about stimuli, such as concepts, ads, messages, etc… Online allows consumers to review and comment without being influenced by others. (Note: IdeaStream™ has an unbiased feature, which ensures participants have to have given their response before they can see/comment on the posts of other participants during public tasks)
• You need to be more selective when conducting in-person research (whether this is for groups, in-homes, shop-alongs, etc…).  This is especially important when a video deliverable is part of your output.

With that said, here are a few things to keep in mind in order to maximize its potential:

• When managing and moderating online qual, make sure you resource enough people and time.  When you’re creating the tasks, imagine how much time will it take to read through everything, comment/probe and digest? How much manpower do you really need?  And have you budgeted for it?
• Should you be creating an analysis grid? Yes – and before you even finalize your design – your hypotheses should help shape what this grid is, with the opportunity to be flexible.
• Is there a system that can help you organize the raw data? Based on your hypotheses, do you have loose themes that you can use to group learnings? (Note: IdeaStream™ has master tags that you can utilize to start putting things into loose groupings)
• If you have co-moderators, should you be downloading with them? I found that if you are working with co-moderators, you should have frequent meetings to download learnings.  If it’s a weeklong study, a quick 30-minute download at the end of the day is useful.  If it’s longer than one week, meeting every-other-day will help.  Managing a large online qual study can be challenging, and staying on top of it ensures you don’t miss a beat.  In addition, this allows you to be flexible with the design as you can alter tasks based on how respondents are reacting to them.

Lastly, when designing your research study, my biggest tip is to bounce ideas off others.   They can be the recruiters, fieldwork managers, platform managers, your co-workers, etc… Having more eyes on your study will ensure that the tasks make sense and that you’ll answer the questions you are commissioned with.  In addition, before I sign off, I recommend reading through Stephen’s, Tom’s and Anna’s blog entries for best practice tips.   These are extremely useful as they give an inside look at online qual’s inner workings.

Why using panelists doesn’t always make for great online qual research

A quick guide to effective task design

Best Practices for Online Qual Recruitment

A Researcher’s View on Online Qual

Erica Pascual is a qual researcher and brand strategist with experience across the pharma, healthcare, apparel, and CPG industries.  She has been using Dub’s IdeaStream™ platform for the past 2 years, delivering strategic and actionable insight to clients.

At the recent QRCA Annual Conference in Montreal (hashtag #qrca12), Dub were lucky enough to have IdeaStream™ – our online qual and MROC platform, used in case studies on more than one occasion. Naturally, we’re very proud of these associations with some of the QRCA’s leading moderators.

One case study that used IdeaStream™ was by Shaili Bhatt and Emily Fitz-Gerald of C+R Research, one of our favorite clients. Shaili and Emily conduct a lot of online qual, so we thought we’d share some of the top tips and highlights from their presentation.

• A welcome video at the beginning of each project really does improve participation;  participants know they are communicating with real people behind the software.  It also let’s them know recording a webcam video isn’t a scary thing to do
• Use mobile qual for regular journalling, to understand life balance, core values, and interest
• Co-creation exercises are extremely fun and engaging with the right audiences. In particular, families, with the involvement of parents AND kids, is always a winner
• To stimulate great conversation or to spice things up a bit, try running a male track and a female track, then let the them take a peak what the other sex is saying!
• For longer-term projects, consider having responders do the weekly summary for you. Share some of the favorite pictures you receive with the rest of the group.
• Consider exercises that let people play with their technology a bit.  A training video allows them to work the kinks out and will lead to better quality videos throughout the rest of the project.
• Make sure the first ‘ask’ is simple so that drop-outs are low, and as a rule of thumb don’t ask people to do things you wouldn’t be willing or able to do yourself!
• Let participants do their own blogging in the community. Use sweepstakes, send newsletters.  Some of the best insights come our of spontaneous activity!
• Along the same line, let people create their own discussions. Sometimes people will ask something that you forgot to ask yourself. Consider don’t even participating in those discussions. Let people do their own thing.
• Ask outright what questions they want to ask. “What did we not ask you that you want to tell us?”
• Engage right from the get go, as soon as they are recruited. Welcome videos, setting expectation, create teams names, have a quote of the day, do photo safaris, recipe sharing contests, fun irrelevant questions, open forum – it’s all about engagement!
• Fun activities like seat these brands around the table like people, which brand sits next to which brand.
• An interesting projective technique can be to have the participants write a ‘Help Wanted’ ad for a product that doesn’t exist
• Share superstars and quotes with the clients every day, every week; provide video highlight reels to bring the research to life.

There’s also a few watch-outs the girls mentioned, as follows:

• Don’t ask people to do something “right now”, it’s counter-intuitive
• Keep workload reasonable and spread out
• Avoid video overload – half an hour every day is too much
• Don’t expect people to engage over weekends and holidays
• Give everyone an individual greeting
• Be prepared to up the incentives or re-recruit
• Plan for technology failures so download your data regularly
• Don’t overwhelm email accounts with probes

To get a whole load more hints and tips, why not get in contact with our resident experts, Ed Golsby (UK) by emailing ed@dubishere.com / +44 (0) 20 7247 3327, or Kerry Hecht (US) on kerry@dubishere.com / +1 310 997 5779

Recently, Dub has completed a new ‘Recruitment Pack’ available to clients within IdeaStream. This pack contains useful information to help researchers get the most from their recruitment partners ahead of an online qual project or research community (MROC). We thought it would be good to share some of the thoughts and insights we have picked up over the years.

If we go back four years, to when Dub started, recruiters and fieldworkers were somewhat new to online qualitative research. Many recruitment agencies, while happy to support online research projects, did not have clearly defined processes. This presented problems, most common of which was the simply not gathering correct email addresses at the point of recruitment. A basic spelling mistake at that stage could result in days of lost research.

Over time, things have improved. Many of the more progressive recruiters now have defined protocols for testing email addresses and ensuring minimum competencies are achieved. However, Dub has found that all too often, the relationship between recruiter and researcher stops at the point of passing over the list of email addresses. This leaves researchers with the role of ensuring suitable numbers of participants sign up – something that really should be the responsibility of the professional recruitment agency.

To this affect, Dub has updated the IdeaStream research platform so it’s now possible to allow ‘recruiters’ to log in and have access to certain areas. This allows researchers to offload the responsibility of making sure participants sign-up, login and get started. Not only does this ensure our clients get full value for money from their suppliers, it also means they can focus on their core skill sets – moderation, analysis and reporting.

Below is an abbreviated breakdown of the guide ‘Getting the most out of your recruiter’. This is included in the recruitment pack.

1: Pre-launch

• Make sure you send your recruiter a ‘recruitment criteria’ document. This should cover basic digital-user competencies and hardware / software requirements
• Make sure you agree ‘sign-up’ and ‘completion’ goals with your recruitment partners.
• In addition, look to lay out roles and responsibilities for managing participants once your community has launched
• If you are supplied with an incorrect email address for a participant, you can easily loose a day or more of research. Talk to your recruitment partner and look to understand what process they use to verify email addresses
• Take advantage of the ‘recruiter’ role on the IdeaStream platform. This allows your recruiters to see who has and has not signed up. It a lose allows them to see how many tasks each participants has posted to

2: During the project

• Make sure your recruitment partners log in on a regular basis to monitor the sign-up rates of your participants.
• Ensure that the goals and responsibilities are adhered to
• Give your recruiters any launch documentation you send out to your participants. This allows them to get participants, whose details may have been incorrectly submitted, up and running without your intervention

We’d like to welcome you to the first in what we hope to be many posts from qualitative researchers across the globe that have used our software – IdeaStream, HeadsUp and UpClose – to deliver outstanding research. We very much hope that the series stimulates debate and discussion, and we encourage you to post your comments and questions back to the author.

So without further ado, please welcome Dr Alison Lyons from Counterpoint Research. Alison recently worked with Dub to deliver an study that looked into premium lager consumption behaviours. Being Scottish, Alison assured us she knew her subject and could hold her own in any forum, so we put her to the test. Here’s what she had to say….

Say hello and introduce yourself to our readers, highlighting your online and offline experience.

Hi there, I’m Alison Lyon and I’ve been a researcher for over 20 years. My first job was lecturing in Research Methods and Education, after which I moved into commercial market research. I kept up an interest in new methods though, and established a qualitative telephone unit at Network Research, before setting up Counterpoint Research in 1991. We were one of the very first UK agencies to start offering online methodologies, so it’s really exciting to see them incorporated pretty much across the board nowadays.

From your experience, what do you glean from online qual methods (communities, bulletin boards etc) that you don’t get from more traditional f2f methods?

Time, reflection and creativity. Face to face is brilliant for living in the moment, pushing respondents into uncomfortable spaces, in-depth conversations and visceral reactions. Online is much better when you need more time to track not only how people feel ‘in the moment’, but also once they’ve thought about it, talked about it with their friends/ family, changed their minds a couple of times and (usually) landed on a compromise opinion.

It’s also great when you want to encourage a lot of independent interaction between respondents. Often the most fascinating discussions start when participants ask each other questions : questions you might not ask as a moderator.

The most often-cited advantage of online methods is that they don’t require participants to be physically present all at the same time, in the same location, so it makes peer to peer interaction possible between a much broader range of the population.

When you choose to use online methods, what are the most common drivers?

Most experienced researchers will look at the research problem and consider what methods will work best, in what kind of combination – nowadays that should mean considering on and offline methods.

I’d say the most common reasons I have for recommending an online approach are :

- when the service/ product/ problem to be researched is also based online

- as mentioned above – when you need to give respondents time and space to reflect, look at the issues from another angle, talk about it etc.

- when you need a balance between the individual’s story and group reactions (e.g. including diaries/ blogs/ journals as well as online discussions)

- and yes, logistics (geographically spread sample, professionals/ stakeholders who can’t commit to being physically available all at the same time etc)

- when the topic is extremely personal, and/ or complex – so respondents will struggle to express themselves well without feeling under pressure in a face to face environment

What do you see as the difference, if any, in the way people express themselves online versus in person?

There are lots of differences, which obviously need to be taken into consideration when designing and analysing online content – but they also vary depending on who you’ve invited online.

For instance, elderly investors unused to having anything like a discussion online are much more like their offline selves. They take time and spell out all their words, include all the punctuation and get annoyed when they make spelling mistakes.

Young people used to social networking tend to express themselves much more emphatically online – their emotions tend to be bigger, and expressed very quickly. But they’ll also change their mind more quickly and be open to others’ points of view.

An enormous benefit of online with young people is that there isn’t that difficult, awkwardness you sometimes get when you ask a group of strangers to come together, open up and be frank with one another.

What tactics and tools do you use successfully to manage the rivers of data produced in online research communities?

The best online platform/ software providers allow you to organise the content as you’re reading through it to respond to it – I really like features such as IdeaStream’s ‘rating’ and annotation facilities. They work really well and are brilliant visual ‘breaks’ in a sea of text.

It also allows you to analyse video / photographic / graphics content alongside respondents’ stories.

BUT … the absolutely golden rule is whatever happens in your life / work / relationship / library subscription (remember those?!), stay on top of the content. If you fall behind you will not catch up.

Do you think clients are more or less excited by online research communities than researchers, and why?

I’ve seen an incredibly wide range of responses to the whole online research offer from both clients and researchers. But it’s rare that either researchers or clients have experienced online qualitative research without being excited by it … and those who weren’t were few and judging online options as “cheap” options. Which they’re not.

What do you most enjoy about running online research communities?

Like with face to face research, it’s the people. I absolutely love the way research participants will share their feelings, ideas, experiences, fears, aspirations in such a generous way. The difference with online is that we give them so many ways to explore and feedback – it’s not just time limited and mainly speech-based.

I also love working longer term with participants and clients – that is incredibly fulfilling.

Finally, I enjoy the buzz participants get out of working in such cool and innovative ways, and being able to see what a difference they make as their ideas are acted upon.

How do you sell the benefits of online research communities to your clients, and what do you see as the ongoing challenges of encouraging clients that it’s the right fit with their objectives?

I talk about the frankness, the creativity and the depth they’ll get from their participants, and about how involved they’ll be able to get.

I also talk about the beautiful transparency of online approaches, and how they’ll have a much closer relationship with their customers because of online communities.

I also talk about their responsibilities – if they’re asking their customers to give so much to them, they have to think carefully about what they’re giving back.

What participants do you think are the best fit with online methods and why?

Do you know, I’ve used online approaches with the least tech-savvy people and had absolutely fantastic results. But obviously the less the participants have been online, the more work needs to go into preparing an environment where they feel comfortable.

So I’d say don’t rule anyone out, and don’t automatically think that young people will always be right for online on every topic.

Do you have any examples of online tasks and exercises that have worked extremely well and exceeded your expectations?

I conducted a series of online forums on the topic of egg and sperm donation for the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority recently. The target audience was the general public and those with an active faith. The forums took place over 5-6 days and were absolutely fascinating. By encouraging participants to talk with friends and family about the issues being raised in the forum we were able to understand attitudes on a much deeper level.

Participants also started interacting with one another in a fascinating way, sharing some very personal, private and difficult moments with one another, and providing support and encouragement.

At the end of the project I had received a mountain of personal emails from participants, saying how amazed they were that they were able to participate so easily and how perfect an environment online had been for exploring such complex, difficult and personal issues.

Whatever the task, the best online platforms make it fun, easy and quick for respondents to feed back what they’ve done in a creative, interesting and thoughtful way. It has to make them look good to keep them engaged and involved.

What are you most excited about in the world of online qual research right now?

I’m really excited about how online platforms are much more flexible, and how easy it is now to combine approaches: so a few key participants in a longer term community can be asked to participate in mini-focus groups, tasks can be analysed alongside forum responses, or blogs etc. In the past researchers had to decide on either a forum, or an online texting group, or a video-conference, or a community … nowadays we can spec what we think is appropriate for different issues and participants, and the software/ platform can cope with it.